It would not be an exaggeration to say that without Vince Zampella, I would not have the honor of holding this job. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare changed the way I played games, interacted with them within the community, and made me think more deeply about levels and mission design than I had up to that point in my life. I was fifteen when the game was released in 2007, and while I had enjoyed playing games throughout my childhood by then, nothing suffocated me more than the rhythmic nature of the multiplayer in the original Modern Warfare. For hours I would run through the tight corridors of the abandoned Vacant office building with a shotgun or sit cowardly waiting at one end of the Crossfire, hoping someone would stumble across my sniper scope view. You see, until now I was firmly entrenched in single-player, having grown up on a combination of point-and-click adventures and Grand Theft Auto (way too early), but COD 4 opened my eyes to a completely different side of the games I’ve come to love over the years. I’ve lost thousands of hours of my life to Call of Duty, Rainbow Six Siege, and Overwatch, and I have Vince Zampella to thank for that.
Of course, no one creates a game on the scale of Call of Duty alone, but there’s no denying the impact Zampella has had on this particular series and the shooter genre in general over the past two decades. Long before Modern Warfare, unbeknownst to me, it had been shaping my taste in video games for years. As lead designer of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, he helmed EA’s signature World War II shooter at a time when cinematic aspirations were a relatively recent idea in the medium. Drawing inspiration from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, I will never forget the first time I watched the phenomenal Normandy landing sequence on Omaha Beach and how it fully evoked the horror of that scenario.
This philosophy can then be translated into a series with which Zampella will always be synonymous: Call of Duty (which in Zampella’s hilariously blunt wordsonly exists because “EA are dicks”). His early entries were fantastic, and two of them were my favorites of 2005. I’ve always been fascinated by this period because as a child my dad watched me in many, many World War II movies – The Great Escape, The Longest Day, Dambusters, A Bridge Too Far. I sat in front of all of them on a Sunday afternoon (again, I was probably much too newborn), so it was only natural that when I reached my teens, I would want to experience these battles and missions behind enemy lines first-hand.
So I admit that I was skeptical about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare even before its premiere. I’m naturally wary of change and was hesitant to replace my trusty M1 Garand with the M16. I couldn’t have been more wrong, however, as it almost immediately became my favorite shooter campaign I’ve ever played – with Titanfall 2, Zampell’s later project, being the only one to come close. The way these cinematic aspirations were brought into the present day was stunning, turning the lens away from the films my father showed me to my own discoveries like Black Hawk Down and Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies. The way it placed you in the action was unlike anything I’d played before, with the stimulating opening to Crew Expendable and the explosive crescendo of Shock and Awe being just two of the many highlights.
And of course, All Ghillied Up, which turns every single one of the campaign ideas halfway upside down in a way that is still one of the most iconic levels in video games to this day. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is one of the missions that opened my eyes to what is involved in video game design and what is possible when ideas are taken out of the box and given the freedom to develop them. It’s such a fine, balanced work that works like clockwork even when you try to mess with its systems that I couldn’t aid but think about how it was built. Secretly crawling into the haunted Pripyat is a masterclass in level design, and credit goes to Zampella, who was studio head at Infinity Ward at the time, for encouraging and incubating such creativity.
The Modern Warfare campaign is a landmark in itself (among many other achievements, it also has one of the most memorable hit sequences in gaming history), but when you add that too, it gives birth to perhaps the most revolutionary multiplayer shooter before the launch of Fortnite, a package that set the stage for a series that would take over the world. I remember that Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer was the first time I was so involved in online video games. For my sins, I didn’t have an Xbox at the time, so I was tardy to the Halo party. Instead, Modern Warfare was my gateway into that world as I began dusting off everything I could to get better at the game and watching clips at a skill level I knew deep down I would never achieve. I looked for meta-compilations, which seemed recent to me at the time, and used wikis and guides on sites like IGN at a time when I had no aspirations of one day being someone who wrote lyrics there myself. Modern Warfare’s straightforward but effective multiplayer loop opened my eyes to all this, with more of a loop of upgrading weapons and unlocking perks, only to gain prestige and do it all over again, filling most of my after-school evenings. I just couldn’t stop playing and I didn’t want to either.
But Zampella’s influence on me continued long after his time on Call of Duty ended. After founding Respawn, his work on Titanfall saw a sequel in 2016, and some say it may even have eclipsed the peaks of the Modern Warfare campaign. The fluidity of its movement, the devastating joy of piloting multiple mechs, and of course the level design in games like Effect and Cause and Into the Abyss are timeless when it comes to single-player shooters. Apex Legends will be created from this universe. Still, my favorite Battle Royale game captures Titanfall’s mobility and combines it with the power of an arsenal of weapons that few can match. And then there’s Star Wars. 2023’s Jedi: Survivor is one of my favorite games that have been released in recent years. It delivered on the promises of the original to fantastic effect, making me feel like I was playing a recent Star Wars movie, much like the original trilogy that my dad also showed me as a kid, in between World War II epics. By the way, over Christmas break I had the idea of playing Survivor again floating around in my head. Now I know, I will definitely do it.
As I said earlier, no one creates a game on the scale that Vince Zampella could create himself. However, there is no denying the impact that the legendary creator of Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Titanfall and Star Wars Jedi has had on 21st century video games. Not only is he a pioneer of first-person shooters, but his pursuit of consistently creating cinematic experiences has permeated the field for decades. On a personal level, I am incredibly grateful. Not only because many of these games have been my lifelong favorites, but also because if it weren’t for how deeply they engaged me, I probably wouldn’t have been lucky enough to write about them for a living. Vince, thank you. I may have never had the chance to meet you, but I loved playing the games you helped create, as I know many millions of other people do too.
Simon Cardy is a senior editor at IGN who can mostly be found hanging around open-world games, watching Korean cinema, or moping about the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
