‘Not on the bingo card’: Use of Call of Duty footage for Iran war hype raises eyebrows

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Trump administration attracted harsh criticism from the Washington political class Wednesday night after it posted a video using imagery from the video game Call of Duty to promote its war against Iran, but it also spurred a surprise reaction from another audience: professional Call of Duty players and content creators.

In a video montage shared to the White House’s official X and TikTok pages, the administration interspersed clips of U.S. airstrikes destroying Iranian jets, missile launchers and other targets with footage from the massively popular first-person shooter.

Set to a hip-hop background track from artist Childish Gambino, the compilation began with a short clip from 2022’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II that shows a player activating the game’s “mass guided bomb” score streak reward. In the game’s multiplayer mode, players are given access to the MGB killing 30 other players without dying. The heavy airstrike blankets the in-game map and ends the game — in other Call of Duty titles, a “tactical nuke” accomplishes the same goal.

Throughout the rest of the White House video, real-life Iran combat footage was altered to feature elements from the “heads up display” Call of Duty players see while playing the game. And the administration edited in the shooter’s signature “+100” score notifications for every U.S. bomb seen destroying an Iranian target.

In the hours after the White House’s Call of Duty-inspired video went live, critics of the Trump administration panned the offering as an effort to reduce the controversial Iran war —  which has so far killed six U.S. service members and more than 500 Iranians — to little more than a game.

“They think war is a video game,” wrote author and veterans’ affairs activist Paul Rieckhoff in a post on X. “Inappropriate, juvenile and unacceptable.”

But it wasn’t just people in the political space who were surprised by the White House’s use of the world’s most popular shooter to promote its military campaign against Tehran. “Did the White House just post COD? What timeline is this?” wrote Call of Duty creator Swagg to his more than half a million followers on X.

“The White House releasing a Call of Duty montage was not on the bingo card,” remarked gaming streamer Jake Lucky. “Holy. Fucking. Shit,” wrote Kick streamer Adiofreak.

And James Godoy, who posts Call of Duty videos to more than 1 million YouTube subscribers, simply responded: “Holy.”

The Trump administration’s Call of Duty montage also prompted an unusual response from Chance Glasco, one of the founding members of Infinity Ward, the development studio behind the Call of Duty franchise.

Glasco, now the owner of a virtual reality consulting firm and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote in a post that after Call of Duty publisher Activision fired two Infinity Ward leads in early 2010, the company put the development team under “very awkward pressure” to make the title’s next instalment center around Iran attacking Israel.

“Luckily the vast majority of our devs were disgusted by the idea and it got shot down.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops, the game’s 2010 offering, was set during the early years of the Cold War and featured campaign missions which took place in Cuba, Siberia and Vietnam. More recent instalments have opted to use fictional locations for the game’s narrative.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has defended its move to begin what President Donald Trump and the Pentagon have repeatedly referred to as a “war” against Iran. The Defense Department and the White House have maintained that their primary aims are to eliminate Tehran’s missile and drone infrastructure, sink its navy and completely destroy the country’s ability to enrich uranium needed for nuclear weapons.

Early in the U.S. strike on Iran, a joint operation with Israel, authorities in Tehran said a girl’s school in the country’s southern province was hit by an explosion which killed as many as 175 people, mostly schoolgirls. Neither Washington nor Jerusalem has said it was responsible for the strike, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is investigating.

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