Former Treyarch co-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 truly cemented his legacy with Mob of the Dead and Origins in Black Ops 2, setting the mold for the mode’s now-iconic Easter Eggs and puzzle-piece storyline.
He left the studio not long after Black Ops 4 was released, which had an infamously rocky post-launch due to budget cuts, forcing Treyarch to abandon plans and scrap some of its more ambitious ideas. Given how much Zombies fell from grace in subsequent games, shoehorning Warzone mechanics, operators, and open world battle royale-style maps into the mode, fans often wonder what could have been had Blundell 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 always wanted to make an Atlantis map, something that has been rumored for well over a decade.
Call Of Duty Zombies Fans Have Wanted An Atlantis Map Since The First Black Ops
Blundell didn’t divulge any details about his plans for Atlantis, or even what game he wanted to make it for, but we can take 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, perhaps Atlantis would have featured as one of Black Ops 4’s final maps, though what it might have looked like is anyone’s guess. I’m picturing Rapture from BioShock, in the vein of 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 slashed 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 proof they could find to support that. Take one 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 for the community.
“Something I heard in TranZit while completing the Tower of Babble easter egg. I was playing as Samuel and I heard him say repeatedly while training zombies, “I’ve got enough bullets for everyone in Atlantis!’,” Redexx posted in 2013. “I thought this was kind of odd. Why would that fit into anything if it wasn’t a hint to the last map? And finally, the basic logic part. Black Ops’ biggest hint: Moon. It was in space. Polar opposite? Underwater.”
Blundell might 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 taking place on a giant floating skull in orbit of Saturn, featuring a teleporter that takes you to a temple on Mars. So, maybe one day we’ll finally see the Atlantis vision fully realized. At the very least, we know the community wasn’t alone in wanting a trip to the lost city.
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