Call of Duty Player Notices Detail That May Connect First Game to Modern Warfare Trilogy
The Call of Duty series has never been shy about planting Easter eggs or making call backs to earlier games in the series. Perhaps the most famous of this is Captain Price, who was a side character in the very first game and would later become a major player in the Modern Warfare series. However, one eagle-eyed players seems to have found another side-character in the original Call of Duty who shares a loose connection with the Modern Warfare series, along with a real-life member of the Soviet cosmonaut program.
Reddit user ROBLOXUTTP posted the discovery after playing through the Russian campaign in the original 2003 Call of Duty game. During the campaign, they found an NPC named Pvt. Gagarin fighting alongside the player's character. ROBLOXUTTP also points out the character is referred to as Yuri during gameplay.
The real-world connection is late-Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin was a member of the Soviet Air Force during the 1960s when he was recruited to the USSR's space program. He would ultimately serve as part of the Vostok-1 flight, becoming the first human to go to space in 1961 until his untimely death a few years later in 1968 due to a fatal MiG-15 crash during a routine training flight.
One the one hand, the Modern Warfare connection is akin to Captain John Price appearing in the World War II-set games and the original Modern Warfare series. Yuri makes his first proper appearance in the Modern Warfare series as one of the playable characters in 2011's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. He is revealed to be a former member of the Russian Ultranationalist group responsible for igniting World War III in the game's narrative, but aids Price and 'Soap' MacTavish in stopping his former comrade and series villain, Vladimir Makarov.
Capt. John Price has been a mainstay of the Modern Warfare games from the original 2003 game to 2019's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot. Another example of this is Viktor Reznov, who made his series debut in 2008's Call of Duty: World at War from developer Treyarch. The studio's subsequent Black Ops games would share more direct links to World at War compared to other games across Call of Duty's history.
While the all these connections can add a little extra intrigue to the series, it's also fair to argue some of these call-backs are happy accidents. Capt. Price serves as an example of this, ultimately serving as a throwaway character killed during the British section of the 2003 game's campaign. That said, making these call-backs can be seen as reflective of the respective developers' love for the different sub-sects of the Call of Duty series. Treyarch did not shy away from this its 2020 release of Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War with a mission set in the ruins of a Soviet facility in the Yamantau mountains players destroyed in the original Black Ops game.
Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X.
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