Call of Duty (2003)

You are more than welcome to replace this entry with the Call of Duty game of your preference. Perhaps you’re being extremely picky, and think it should be Call of Duty II. Maybe for you the series only made sense once it entered Modern Warfare. Perhaps for you it’s all about 2020’s Warzone. Whatever the case, there’s no getting away from Call of Duty’s importance to first-person shooting, no matter how weary we may have become of its annual blockbuster bluster.

But let’s go back to its roots, because it turns out they’re damned fine ones, and ones well worth returning to on the series’ 20th year. It’s safe to say that Call of Duty began with slightly different ambitions to the billion-dollar series it is today. While bombast and explosions were always a core element, the first three games had another ambition: to tell the stories of surviving veterans of World War II, most of whom have since died.

This meant that rather than playing as some generic gruff hero, you played as the lowest ranked soldiers, the nobodies sent out to brutally die in the terrible conflicts. Often you could better survive a level’s onslaught by hiding behind a wall than trying to stand alongside your squadmates, although doing so felt utterly monstrous. This was a game about tiny moments within the larger war, about desperate struggles, scrappily getting through a Nazi encampment with three bullets. The original Call of Duty remains a deeply moving game to play, in a way the series has never managed to recapture.