Call of Duty 5: Preemptive Operations

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Try not to be surprised, people, but I actually accomplished something this week.  Yes, I know, it’s unusual, but I was inspired and had to do it. I pulled a pretty decent prank on a friend of mine at work and he was a good sport about it (if not, I’d be blogging about my trip to the hospital after I fell on a doorknob). First, a disclaimer: I don’t like pranking people. Even though this was really funny I still feel guilty about it. I think this is the first prank I’ve pulled in years and I don’t intend to do another in this decade. Also, pranking me would be a bad idea. The last person who did that (goes by the alias of Spider-man) was almost stabbed with an umbrella by yours truly. Don’t get any ideas.

Here’s the setup. A good friend of mine (who we’ll call “Captain Crunch” for anonymity’s sake) is a huge fan of the Xbox 360 game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. He bought an Xbox 360 just for that game, and plays it way more than is healthy. Now you see why I like him. Anyway, I came up with a simple idea: what if we made a fake game disc label for “Call of Duty 5” and stuck it on another Xbox game? How long would it take for him to figure out it wasn’t real?

My first task was to decide on a subtitle. After “Modern Warfare,” what else is there? Future Wars? Battlefield 2142? I settled on the spooky sounding “Preemptive Operations” after asking Wikipedia for a list of US Special Operations Forces units. Sounded realistic enough.

Next was to design a label. I’ve worked enough with Adobe Illustrator to make my own labels, so time for an Xbox 360 game disc forgery attempt. It took two hours on Google Images to bring back the seven labels on the Call of Duty 4 disc, plus some photoshopping (“illustratoring?”) to do the green striped gradient up top, circular text and the long, phony legal text under the Activision logo. Note the black stripe under the game title that says “Alpha Version – Not for Sale or Distribution.”

Sticking it to the disc was another matter. It came out great on my color laser printer, but I forgot that one measly label wouldn’t be enough to cover up the image on the real game disc. Which one did I pick? Why, nothing but the most un-Call of Duty game I could find: Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2. Oh yes. The cover of that game is mostly purple, with a shot of Lei Fang in what passes for a conservative one piece bikini in that game. I put my label on and realized that the inner section of the disc was still showing! Not good. So I put on a smaller circular label to hide all the purple but was left with a small ring where the two labels failed to intersect. It wasn’t great, but it would do. Later I stuck a second Call of Duty 5 label on the disc so reduce the see-through effect. It worked a little better, but I should have used a plain white label as a base layer and then applied my custom one.

The disc was done, but what about a little context? Infinity Ward wouldn’t just ship somebody a game disc and expect him to pop it in, no questions asked. Actually, that wouldn’t happen under any circumstances, as Call of Duty 5 will be developed by Treyarch. But I figured Mr. Crunch wouldn’t know that and thus wrote him a letter from Grant Collier, studio head of Infinity Ward. He was randomly selected to participate in alpha testing of Call of Duty 5. Put in the disc, accept the update (in reality, the patch for DOAX Volleyball 2), and accept the non-disclosure agreement. You can read it for yourself, but all I aimed to do with this letter was put his fears at ease and get him to put in the disc. There are some impossibilities in there: Xbox Live Gamertags can’t be colored in green and Microsoft would never give out your home address to anyone except the police without notifying you.

With the disc made and letter printed I brought it to work and had my supervisor, Remy, fake an official looking signature. We put it in a UPS overnight mailing sleeve and attached a label that I had photoshopped the night before. During lunch our company runner swung by his house and dropped it off. Nobody said a word to Mr. Crunch about it. He gets UPS mailings all the time (claimed his roommate), so this one wouldn’t be a huge surprise.

The events of that night, as best I can reconstruct them: when Mr. Crunch gets home he finds the UPS envelope waiting for him. He looks at the mailing label and notices that it’s from Infinity Ward, thinking that it’s some apology for the Xbox Live downtime during the end of 2007. The “Extremely Urgent” marking on the envelope (which I did not forge) catches his eye and he opens the envelope. What he finds first is the Call of Duty 5 game disc, to which he says (disbelievingly) “no.” Then he reads the letter and says “no” again, as though he cannot believe his luck (or indeed, why he would have been selected). To his credit he was very skeptical, even noticing that the label had been stuck on the disc twice. Happily, he didn’t see all the way through to the volleyball game beneath.

He pops the game in the Xbox 360 and sees Dead or Alive’s legal text and the update notification but panics and declines the update. Then he ejects the game, worried that it could damage his console (not an unrealistic expectation given the number of labels I stuck on that thing). However, elation and suspicion eventually combine into exuberance. He leaves our runner a voice message on Xbox Live saying, “Dude, I just got Call of Duty 5 Alpha Version. Oh yeah!” and calls my phone at about 9PM. I’m at the computer but I have my iPhone next to me. When I see his name pop up I immediately hit the sleep button to mute it. I have all the Photoshop and Illustrator skills necessary to prank someone, but I can’t keep a straight face to save my life. Eventually it goes to voicemail. I check it immediately and hear the same message but in a guarded tone of voice. I figure he’s on to me and have a good laugh, assuming the joke’s over. I don’t call him back, wanting to see him in person.

The next day he shows up to work and meets a friend in the parking lot. He’s brought the whole package with him to work, looking for outside advice on whether it’s legit. The friend is in on it, but he plays dumb and follows Mr. Crunch inside. I’m already at work, and the friend frantically tries to find my phone extension to warn me that Mr. Crunch is on his way up to see me. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The instant he stepped in with the UPS envelope I was grinning from ear to ear. He says “is this…” and I burst out laughing. Realizing it was a joke he drops the envelope on the table and growls “you bastard.” The IT department erupts in laughter and I explain that I’m the one behind it all.

To my relief he wasn’t mad and admitted it was a great prank. Much love to everyone who participated, especially Mr. Crunch for being such a good prankee. You, and you alone, have permission to try and get me back if you so choose. I’m a suspicious one, though, so it won’t be easy. May I recommend a letter from Steve Jobs, indicating I’ve been selected to test a prototype second generation iPhone?