Tightly scripted and always a treat for the eyes, the Call of Duty games have been responsible for some of the most memorable moments we've experienced in the history of gaming. This year Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare diverges from the World War II roots of the series to present a game experience that anyone who watches the news can relate to.

As we ramp up for GameSpy's upcoming Game of the Year awards, Call of Duty 4 -- a strong title on both PC and Xbox 360 -- numbers among our list of nominees. We spoke with Art Director Richard Kriegler and Lead Artist Joel Emslie from Infinity Ward about what it was like bringing the game to life.



GameSpy: Congratulations again for being one of our Game of the Year nominees. After several games in the World War II setting, you decided to "go modern" with Call of Duty 4. Was that an easy decision to make?

Richard Kriegler, Art Director: That was a very easy decision to make because basically -- even though Joel and I weren't here yet -- from the very beginning [Infinity Ward] wanted to make a modern warfare game. Even when making the original Call of Duty this was a wish they had in the back of their brain. And so it was building up and building up through two games... we've been wanting to make this game for a long time. And here it is! We're very pleased about it.
Joel Emslie, Lead Artist: ...The original concept for [the original] Call of Duty was to be a modern game, but they decided to take a different approach on it.
Call of Duty 4 Brings the franchise to the modern era.

GameSpy: Did you struggle as a team to find a tone for the new game? Or was this setting in your mind from (as you said) the very first game?

Richard Kriegler: There was no struggle! We were well-poised to do this game. We'd been thinking about it for a long time. We had lots of passion and lots of ideas to try to get forward. We think about it -- there are 60 to 80 people here, and everybody has an idea about what they want to see and how they want it to work. And so the passion runs really high. The only struggle we probably had was: how do you curtail yourself down from all these wishes to what's the game going to be?
GameSpy: That was going to be my next question -- did you find yourself cutting out a lot of ideas? Things you really wanted to dor

Richard Kriegler: Every game you have to cut out lots of ideas and try to trim it down to something that's doable. And that's the fun part.
[Next: Location research and creeping players out...]