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Maybe it's something to do with Steven Spielberg. The director's Second World War drama Saving Private Ryan has become a dividing line in the history of action cinema. There is everything that came before Spielberg's Normandy beach landings, with their shellshock camerawork and stinging audio occlusion, and there is everything that came after. To play Modern Warfare Remastered is to remember another before and to look upon our ongoing after. Returning to it feels like finding the original of a 10th-generation VHS copy - this is the template for all our wargames and shooters, and Spielberg figures in this particular watershed, too. It was his Dreamworks Interactive that created Medal Of Honor, effectively a playable Private Ryan, and it was the team invited by Spielberg to make Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault that later became Infinity Ward. Grant Collier, Vince Zampella, Jason West - names in the Modern Warfare credits that draw a direct line from one redefinition of warfare to another.
Modern Warfare is such a striking break from the past that it's easy to forget that it's also Call Of Duty 4. It feels, with the benefit of hindsight especially, much more like the beginning of something than the fourth of something. The focus on contemporary conflict represents a major shift not just in terms of setting, but of existential purpose. By moving into present day the game leaves behind the safety of the past with all its fixed meanings and solid moral foundations. World War 2 is, by overwhelming cultural if not historical consensus, a virtuous war, distant and heroic-by-default. Even Vietnam has a settled complexity - the ambivalent war, the lessons-were-learnt war. But the wars we have now, a diffuse mix of technology, intelligence and asymmetric engagements, campaigns fought against states, sects and sometimes ideas, have no such clarity.
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