Shack: One of the things that was stressed is that Infinity Ward is trying with Call of Duty 4 to expand the role of storytelling in a first person shooter. How exactly are you attempting to go about this?

Steve Fukuda: One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we kept the intensity of the gameplay there, and one of the ways we do that is we keep the game very continuous. When you're finishing a level as, say, a Marine in the Middle East, we don't just fade to black and then have some text on the screen. We keep visual continuity. We offer a smooth, long, continuous shot up to a military Google Earth view.

On that screen you get a map, and the crosshairs show some information as to where you're going and what's going to happen there, and then you get slam-zoomed in, as we call it--your camera flies down to ground level into the shoes of the next soldier. In this case it might have been an SAS operative. You never really feel that the game is pausing; you're just constantly going from one thing to the next. That's one way we're really facilitating the sense of a continuous adventure that never stops.

Shack: From what I gathered, though, there will be sequences that break chronologically as well, not just geographically. Is that correct?

Steve Fukuda: Exactly, yeah. One of the things we do is, in order to present new information at one point in the story--this is at a very key moment--you make a discovery about a significant plot twist, and a person involved is there. You then actually go back in time, and rather than having that person just say, "Yeah, there was this guy and we had to go kill him," you actually go back fifteen years and you play as the guy who's recounting the story to you. It's very different for a Call of Duty game to do that. It's not normal for the series. It turns into something very cool.

Shack: So with the additions to the series' bag of narrative tricks, are you sticking pretty rigidly to the first person perspective throughout? Are you breaking from it at all?

Steve Fukuda: No, we're pretty strict about that, actually. It's kind of our thing, keeping it visceral, in that first person setting.

Shack: This is a fictional story, with invented characters and conflicts, but clearly there are elements that draw from events occuring in the modern world. How much are you trying to comment on current political situations, or are you keeping yourselves fairly divorced from that?

Steve Fukuda: We're trying to be sensitive to the fact that there are events in the world that we don't want to try and portray verbatim. We don't want to allude to them and say, "Hey, we're creating that right now." I think that would be a little tasteless.

However, we do use a lot of references from real life situations. For example, you'll see guys with the infrared laser markers on their rifles, a whole bunch of them all scanning for targets. That's actually something we saw in one of the videos we received from some of our advisors. We saw these guys somewhere in Iraq, aiming all over with these lasers. Then there was that YouTube video of the AC-130.

Shack: That one sticks with you.

Steve Fukuda: Yeah. It's very iconic. People are used to seeing that kind of thing on CNN a lot now, even seeing a camera view of the bomb falling towards the target, so we're trying to play off of that with some of these parts where the player can really connect visually and recall those situations. They may not remember what exactly had happened in real life, but they get that modern warfare feeling.

Shack: Can you speak at all about the writing process, in terms of working with external writers? I assume the concepts were developed internally, then you went outward to flesh it out.

Steve Fukuda: Yeah. It definitely went through a very long evolution. The story we started out with was really nothing like the story we have today. I think very few missions from the early phases survived, although the AC-130 mission was one of the earliest missions we came up with, because it's just so arresting. That one survived the entire development process.

Eventually, we got to a point where we sort of started to find the voice, so to speak, after transitioning from World War II. To get the right tone, the right feel, the right kind of fiction versus authenticity--that's where we got the writer in to help tie these things together, because there were still a few holes. We weren't quite sure what should happen on a few levels.

We would be sitting there at a writers' meeting--some lead designers, myself, the writer, plus our project lead Jason West--we were sitting there discussing it, and you almost wonder what the writer is doing. We're all sitting there, yelling and talking back and forth, then suddenly the writer will ask a question, or say, "Maybe you should look at it like this." He really guided us in a lot of ways, by asking the right questions but not saying, "Okay, this is the way it's going to be," or just writing it all out. He would more try to point us in the right direction, so that we'd have the ideas ourselves, then polish it up. It was actually a really good experience.

Shack: More of a consultant role.

Steve Fukuda: Yeah, this writer has worked a lot with TV stuff, so he's worked with large creative teams on TV series where they'd say, "You go write that episode, I'll go write this episode." It fit our game, because our game is very much that continuous TV series kind of feel. He helped us hit that really well.

Shack: Did you plot out all that structure episodically, or was there any amount of winging it as you went along?

Steve Fukuda: We probably came at it from both ends. On one hand, yes, we had this master plan, but then we'd start making levels, and we'd get cooler ideas for a level. But maybe that level's part of a two-part storyline. Then we work on the story here, and the levels there, and then they have to meet, and then things come together. So I wouldn't say we rigidly followed a plotted out storyline. Between the levels and the story, one didn't drive the other; it was a much more organic process.

It was a whole new thing for us. In World War II, there was chronology to fall back on, but we'd never worked on a game using this process before. So now we've got another notch on our belt.

Shack: So what relates a Russian warlord type of character to that Middle Eastern situation?

Steve Fukuda: I think that's something we want to keep under wraps a little bit. It's part of the motivation to find out what happens there.

Shack: Despite the change in setting and introduction of an original story, you're still calling this Call of Duty 4. Is this narrative situation a thread you're planning on continuing in the series?

Steve Fukuda: We haven't really decided on that. I think in general we just go all out on every game, expend everything, so I'm not sure how much we're going to leave ourselves for the next one. It's probably too early at this point to really be able to comment.

Shack: As a fully-owned studio now, how much autonomy do you feel you have under Activision?

Steve Fukuda: I'd say we enjoy a fair bit of autonomy. I don't feel we're really being controlled unduly. We've been give a good amount of slack to work on what we want to work on.

Shack: Do you have any thoughts on the PC platform these days? A lot of people were surprised that Call of Duty 3 didn't come to PC. Obviously Infinity Ward itself has a strong PC heritage.

Steve Fukuda: I think it's still viable. I'm not worried about it.

Activision plans to ship Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC this fall.