Former Treyarch studio head and Black Ops 3 director Jason Blundell got his start on Call of Duty Zombies with the World at War map Der Riese – he's the one you can thank for the Pack-a-Punch machine. But he really cemented his legacy with Mob of the Dead and Origins in Black Ops 2, setting the stage for the mode's now-iconic Easter eggs and puzzle-piece story.
He left the studio not long after the release of Black Ops 4, which had a notoriously rocky post-launch due to budget cuts, forcing Treyarch to abandon plans and scrap some of its more ambitious ideas. Considering how much Zombies fell from grace in subsequent games, shoehorning Warzone mechanics, operators and royale-style open world maps, fans often wonder what might have been if Blundell had stayed to steer the ship.
Finally, we have an answer. During a recent stream with JCBackfire, discussing the closure of his first-party PlayStation studio Dark Outlaw Games, Blundell revealed that he's always wanted to make an Atlantis map, something that's been rumored for more than a decade.
Call Of Duty Zombies fans have wanted an Atlantis map since the first Black Ops
Blundell didn't reveal any details about his plans for Atlantis, or even what game he wanted to make it into, but we can make a pretty good guess. If the team had the resources, instead of ending the entire Zombies saga with remakes of Nuketown and Call of the Dead, Atlantis might have been one of Black Ops 4's final maps, though that may have been anyone's guess. I imagine Rapture from BioShock, in the vein of the Moon and Shangri-La.
In fact, many fans believed that work had already begun on Atlantis for Black Ops 4, and that it was scrapped after Activision cut the budget. This was based on a couple of strings found in the files: “zm_blues” and “waterfall”, which is hardly convincing – in all likelihood this was just a case of fans desperately trying to manifest an Atlantis map and looking for any evidence they could find to support it. Take a look at the forums and you can find posts dating back to the very first two Black Ops games theorizing that Treyarch was cooking up an underwater expedition, so it was hardly anything new to the community.
“Something I heard in TranZit while doing the Easter egg in Tower of Babble. I was playing as Samuel and I heard him say repeatedly while training zombies: 'I have enough bullets for everyone in Atlantis!'” Redexx wrote in 2013. “I thought this was a little strange. Why would it fit into anything if it wasn't a clue to the final map? And finally the basic logic part. Black Ops' biggest tip: Moon. It was in space. The polar opposite? Underwater.”
Blundell may not be at Treyarch anymore, but Black Ops 7, Nuketown remake aside, is far more outlandish with its maps than more recent games like Cold War and Black Ops 6, with Astra Malorum set on a giant floating skull in Saturn's orbit, with a teleporter taking you to a temple on Mars. So maybe one day we'll finally see the Atlantis vision come to full fruition. At least we know the community wasn't alone in wanting a trip to the lost city.
Call Of Duty Zombies must go standalone
Zombies need to stop feeling like an afterthought.
