Modern Warfare 2's writer claims "the airport level was a risk we had to take"

Posted Nov 20th 2009 2:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: FPS, Multiplayer, Modern Warfare 2

It's been the talk of the internet ever since its presence was leaked online a few weeks before the game came out. But the now infamous "airport level" in Modern Warfare 2 has certainly generated a lot of debate both among gamers and the mainstream media over whether or not it is appropriate. Now the main scriptwriter for Infinity Ward's first person shooter claims the sequence was something they had to do.

GamePro.com's interview with Jesse Stern (who has a day job as a writer for the NCIS TV series) has him talking extensively about that airport level, where Russian terrorists mow down unarmed civilians. He states, "Every single person in testing opened fire on the crowd, which is human nature." He adds, "I hope that people don't just look at it as being this simplistic and brutal sequence. We've done our best to treat it with care and not to make it gratuitous."

Ultimately Stern feels that the sequence was worth putting into the final product, saying, "This is a triple-A game and the top grosser of all time with this huge budget behind it, yet we're still taking major chances wherever we can and the airport level was a risk we had to take. Sometimes you take huge risks and it really works. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. But if you don't take the chance, you're not going to make something new."

Gallery: Modern Warfare 2 Screenshots

Tags: activision, activision-blizzard, infinity-ward, modern-warfare-2

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

They obviously put it in just to stir up controversy and get in the headlines. It does nothing for the game. Removing it doesn't affect the game at all.

This is even more obviously deliberate than Hot Coffee.

I don't care about this game, though. CoD has been going downhill rapidly ever since the second (while its popularity has been climing!). At this point I refer to the Call of Duty games by year - MW2 is CoD2009 - because it's an IP that gets the same treatment that an EA sports franchise gets.

Yearly releases, low quality.Posted at 3:14PM on Nov 20th 2009 by asfm

Wow, that is a flamebait comment if I ever read one. In my opinion, the Call of Duty games developed by Infinity Ward have been consistently good. Now, the same cannot be said about the ones developed by Treyarch, but even these games are better than most FPS games that are put on consoles.

And I personally believe the airport scene did a lot to help the story. Playing through it, I felt bad for what I was doing, but it did a lot to put me in the shoes of the character. Yeah, if you take it out of context, it seems like a senseless display of violence, but leading up to it, a character (nameless for spoilers) tells you that you will have to do some things that may go against your moral compass, this massacre being one of them. Not that I want to see this become a trend in games, but I believe they took a risk in putting this in the game and it paid off in the end.Posted at 4:06PM on Nov 20th 2009 by Valo

Hey, if you feel the single player in MW2 is all that great, good for you. But for the other people, they can only care so much about a 5 hour SP, and they will feel like such a scene are shoehorned in because they won't connect to it.Posted at 4:24PM on Nov 20th 2009 by Unknown

Had IW done the airport as a short cut-scene I doubt anybody would have been saying to themselves 'damn that looks fun I wish I got to play it'.

If Infinity Ward wants to do something radical in a game, how about starting by making one that isnt 'hold your hand' linear. How many more times are they going to sex up Allied Assault?.Posted at 9:27AM on Nov 21st 2009 by smi04

hi with our repect to infinty ward and it's exceptionnel work on all of the series COD, we consider it a leader of the pc games but in MW 2 we were shocked by the aireport scene very very hard and moraly inacceptable by all of parents and countrys,russian patch preview to elminate it and we hope that infinity ward makes online a free patch: that parents can use to for there son's. the global work is very impressive but a game must be a game and not a virtual reality because civilians are not specially trained like special forces to exceptionnel situations made by terrorists.Posted at 4:51AM on Nov 22nd 2009 by foukach