Call of Duty, the immensely popular war game series, has established itself as a pillar of video gaming within worldwide popular culture.

Since the initial 2003 release of the popular war game that released on Microsoft Windows, Activision Studios has made an additional 23 Call of Duty games in the past 18 years, captivating the attention of multiple age groups.

One of the major reasons that the game has kept its popularity over the last few decades is the amount of platforms the game has been released on. Call of Duty has been released on nearly every generation of Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo consoles while also including mobile releases such as Apple, Android and Blackberry.

The game has constantly recreated the notable wars that have happened throughout history such as World War I, World War II and others.

The series’ newest release, Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, that was distributed for the Xbox One, Xbox One X, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 has gotten mixed reviews from players and critics. This has prompted many to be indecisive about buying the newest addition in the Call of Duty series.

However, the Marquette Gaming and Esports competitive Call of Duty players said they enjoy the newest features found in this release. Some of the Call of Duty players shared a lot of positive reviews when asked about the new first-person shooter game.

“In terms of how the game plays competitively, it feels a lot like ‘Black Ops 2’ (a previous title that was popular among people in the Call of Duty community) which is something I really like,” Dennis Burmeister, a junior in the College of Engineering and captain of the Call of Duty team, said.

Since the competitive Call of Duty team’s conception last year, the team “found a lot of success (as they) were around .500 (in terms of winning percentage),” Miguel Melchor, a sophomore in the College of Engineering, said. Melchor, who is the captain of the Marquette Counter Strike team, a first-person shooter game similar to Call of Duty, said that the Call of Duty team “is looking to improve and expand on their new success.”

Burmeister said that the idea behind Marquette’s Call of Duty team came from the common idea of “playing a game (the team) enjoy(s) competitively and to meet other people who felt the same.” The Marquette Gaming and Esports competitive Call of Duty team is just one of many teams across the club’s myriad of different competitive games.

However, the Call of Duty team’s achievements were halted due to COVID-19 sending students home during spring semester 2020.

Despite COVID-19 threatening the continuation of collegiate sports across the country, the Marquette Gaming and Esports team seems to have been virtually unaffected during the spring and summer months of the pandemic. 

“The coronavirus didn’t do much to our dynamic which I’m very thankful for,” Burmeister said.

To ensure that the team maintains good chemistry, the entire gaming and esports team play games together during free time that they may have. “We put together a couple of community nights where a bunch of our teams would come together and just have fun, take a break from grinding their games … it’s done a lot of good for our club,” Melchor said, and also mentioned he has seen a big rise in club and community participation since he first joined the gaming and esports team three years ago.

Currently, the Call of Duty team is looking for a new player, as one of its previous team members, Aaron Benson, transferred out of Marquette over the summer. This brings the roster count down to just three players.

As tournaments are still questionable, Melchor and Burmeister are optimistic about the prospect of finding a new player and good competition for the spring season.

“We’ll be looking around, there’s obviously little in-house tournaments that we could always do with some of the other local schools,” Melchor said.

This story was written by Jack Lewandowski. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @JacklewMu.