A former developer who spent years working on Call of Duty games at Raven Software has discussed what the Zombies community could have had in a never-ending game. Codenamed Call of Duty Zombies Project: Zed, this free-to-play game would have given the side mode constant updates and microtransactions as you see in Call of Duty Warzone and Multiplayer. It was a standalone title, but would also mean you wouldn’t have had some of your favorite Zombies maps.
Talking with Zombies content creator Glitching Queen, Michael Gummelt outlined what plans were in the works for Project Zed. The whole interview can be watched below, but the portion we are talking about starts at 12:45.
What was Project Zed?
As you might expect, the idea behind Project Zed was to keep players continuously coming back and spending money on various store items like you see in Call of Duty Online and Multiplayer. There was a promise for continual updates, including new maps, modes, and characters to keep you invested.
Gummelt also provided a document that he made back then, outlining what exactly Project Zed would be for both players and Activision.
According to Glitching Queen, Gummelt says that Project Zed was in early talks between the release of Black Ops 2 and 3, so somewhere between 2012-2015. Treyarch was unsure if it wanted to continue doing Zombies but eventually went through with the Jason Blundell-led story, ending in Project Zed being canceled before development started to avoid the two products competing with each other. If the project were to go forward, you likely would not have seen the Zombie modes we got in Black Ops 3, 4, and Cold War.
It is definitely interesting to hear what could have been for Zombies if Project Zed went through. It sounds like it had some of that classic Zombies experience the community loves, but it would have tried new things as well. We don’t think we’d want to give up Black Ops 3 for that, but a standalone CoD Zombies is something we have wanted for a long time.