World War Two? Nah, this is Modern Warfare (Two!)

Brandon Barton picked up the Modern Warfare 2: Prestige Edition box set, which includes night vision goggles.

Remembrance Day officially started at midnight. When the calendar turned over, Brandon Barton was six beers in and seeking ammo for his AA-12 automatic shotgun.

A few hours before, he and some Russian ultranationalists opened fire on civilians in a Moscow airport. When the FSB rolled onto the runway in armoured trucks, Brandon paused and ordered pizza.

“Two large pizzas,” he said into both his cell phone and his Xbox headset. “One pepperoni, one all-meat.”

“Nice,” said the headset. Its voice was that of Nathan Epp, a Maritime expat living in Winnipeg. He’d already mowed through the Moscow airport and had moved on to gunning his way through smoke and Russians toward the Eisenhower Building in Washington. A nuclear bomb had eviscerated the East Coast, and its EMP shockwave destroyed all Nathan’s technology, even his night vision goggles.

Brandon’s night vision goggles work fine. They’re strapped to the flat-black Capt. “Soap” MacTavish bust that came in his Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition box set.

“They work great,” Brandon says of the goggles. “Your depth perception gets a little screwed up, though. Makes it hard to pee accurately.”

* * *

Modern Warfare 2 hit store shelves at midnight on Tuesday, Nov. 10. Robert Hickey couldn’t make it in for the midnight camp-out in the mall, but he did call EB Games to reserve his copy.

Modern Warfare 2's Prestige Edition cost $149 and includes functioning night vision goggles.

“I went in to pick it up that morning,” he said. “The demand was so high, they could only hold it for a day. There were only a few copies left.”

Robert said he played the game all day and through the night, spending the entire first half of Remembrance Day in the sparking glow of mortars and grenade blasts. Around 11 a.m., he remembered to put his controller down, and spent two minutes in silence.

“Everyone else probably forgot,” he said.

Robert’s moving to Ontario in a week for better work. He quit his job at a call centre a few weeks ago, and said he fills his days playing Xbox. The release of Modern Warfare 2 makes his days go by even faster.

“It’s been out for four days,” Robert said. “The menu says I’ve got 24 hours of actual gameplay.”

He said he knows he should be packing, but seeing the game’s case resting near his flat-screen T.V. poses too great a temptation.

“It’s hard for me not to play,” he said. “I want to keep playing.”

Robert said he puts in about 70 online deathmatches a day. He considers himself in training.

Modern Warfare 2 destroyed previous entertainment records, moving 4.1 million copies in 24 hours.

“I want to be up on the leaderboard,” he said. “For the biggest game in the world, I want it to say Robert Hickey is way up there.

“I want to know the maps better. I’m pretty good [at the game], but if other people are better, I’ll know the maps better, so I win.”

Robert’s not the only one playing the game non-stop. Modern Warfare shattered all records upon release, selling 4.1 million copies and earning $310 million in 24 hours, about $155 million more than the biggest Hollywood blockbuster.

“When Halo [3, which set entertainment records in 2007] came out, you’d see 250,000 people online in the first few days,” Robert said.  “This afternoon, [on Modern Warfare 2] I saw 1.5 million.”

Robert’s landlord isn’t upset at his moving out or the constant gunshots pulsing out of Robert’s television, but still managed to hurt Robert’s feelings in the weeks after Robert quit his job.

“He said something that was really mean,” Robert said. “Well, maybe not mean for most people, but I found it really mean.

“He told me that since I quit, I could live in the apartment without paying rent rather than move to Ontario. He said I could just give him my TV and Xbox.”

Robert doesn’t have cable. He bought his $600 television for Xbox only.

“I was like ‘No!’,” he said.  “I’d give body parts before those.”

* * *

In the wake of Modern Warfare 2’s release, even the New York Stock Exchange paused to admire the game’s record-setting numbers in an economy struggling to stay afloat. Newspapers reported on businesses questioning the rash of sick employees calling in with 24-hour swine flu. Brandon Barton says he never considered taking the release day off, but did ponder a schedule overhaul.

“I thought about going straight to bed after work,” he says. He gets home around 4 p.m.

“Then, I could get up at midnight, pick up the game, and play it until work started [at 7:00 a.m.].”

He opted to wait for his Tuesday lunch break since he pre-ordered and reserved his special edition months earlier, though his roommate waited in the midnight line-ups.

“It kind of sucks, though,” Brandon says. “He got a big headstart on me.”

Brandon Barton puts in a few more hours on Modern Warfare 2.

Brandon spent all of Wednesday on Xbox, pausing only to sleep a few hours in the morning. By Thursday, he’d put in 24 hours of gameplay, most of it in “Spec Ops,” special challenges which amount to in-game warfare training.

He says he recognizes the irony in spending a day meant to remember victims of war by trudging through virtual trenches dug into the Washington Monument. But his appreciation of war veterans isn’t diminished by the game.

“It kind of makes war more real,” he says.

In the game, the player mans a helicopter’s mini-gun and must clear out invading forces from the World War Two Memorial in Washington. Modern Warfare 2 features a Russian invasion of the United States following the aforementioned Moscow airport massacre.

“I definitely think it’s ironic,” he says. “But at the same time, millions of people are doing the same thing.”

Later, while taking a break from the game by eating more pepperoni pizza, he reads through the news on his computer.

“Man, those kids who busted that war memorial downtown,” he says.  “Kids these days have no respect.”

Short URL: http://www.newbrunswickbeacon.ca/?p=3107

Posted by TJ Milburn on Nov 15, 2009. Filed under Features, This Week's Edition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.