Despite the overabundance of the first-person shooter in the modern video game landscape, it's kind of impossible to imagine the industry without it. Games like Wolfenstein 3D, the original Doom, and Goldeneye 64 didn't just provide players with countless hours of fond, blood-soaked memories; they also laid the groundwork for every game in the genre that would come after them while pushing forward technological advancements across the entire gaming industry. It's easy to look at them today and see a bunch of unoriginal clones, but there was a time when FPS games were at the cutting edge of the medium.
Nowadays, the most widely recognized and financially successful examples of the genre are Activision’s Call of Duty and EA’s Battlefield series, both of which are immensely successful military franchises that depict wars both real and fictional in the past, present, and future across dozens of games. Since both series debuted (Battlefield in 2002 and Call of Duty in 2003) they’ve been longstanding industry rivals, both responding to and subverting trends inspired by each other, and now that rivalry is about to evolve on the big screen. Just a week after a release date was announced for Paramount Pictures and Microsoft’s upcoming Call of Duty film adaptation, the Battlefield franchise responded with an announcement of its own.
