Fans of Call of Duty: Black Ops have discovered an unfinished Zombies mode hidden within the game’s new PlayStation port more than 15 years after its original release. Call of Duty: Black Ops is a fan-favorite entry in the shooter franchise for its story-heavy campaign and deep Zombies content.
Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 have recently made a big return on PS4 and PS5, with porting studio Iron Galaxy bringing the duology to the PlayStation consoles in early July. Both Black Ops games largely preserve their original campaigns, multiplayer offerings, and Zombies content, as these releases are straightforward ports rather than remakes. That also means many of the technical hiccups and exploits these games had on the Xbox 360 and PS3 have remained intact, which have led to hackers popping up in Black Ops lobbies once again. However, that close preservation of the source material may have also preserved a previously unknown piece of Zombies history.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Nearly Featured a Tower-Defense Zombies Mode
While developing the original Black Ops, Treyarch appears to have experimented with a tower-defense variation of Zombies, as discovered by YouTuber JTAG, who uploaded a short video demonstrating the prototype. Throughout the video, fans can see that the tower-defense mode worked by having zombies travel through defined routes while the player sets up various automated defenses in a top-down view to stop them, as is typical of the genre. In a neat twist, players can also enter the map and play in first-person, creating a hybrid of tower-defense strategy and the traditional first-person Call of Duty Zombies format that fans are accustomed to. The mode does have some rough edges, like unfinished UI and clunky functionality, suggesting that the project remained an early prototype.
Drag weapons to fill the grid
Drag weapons to fill the grid
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While Black Ops’ scrapped tower defense mode never made it to the final release, this prototype could have been an early experiment that led to Dead Ops Arcade. As fans may be aware, Dead Ops Arcade is a similar, overhead-perspective Zombies mode that launched as a bonus in the original Black Ops and has since become a recurring game type. Neither Treyarch nor Iron Galaxy has spoken about why this Zombies defense mode existed, but fans can reasonably believe that the mode could have led to the creation of Dead Ops Arcade due to its top-down perspective similarities, although no evidence currently exists bridging the two directly. If nothing else, the original Black Ops’ cut Zombies prototype points to Treyarch experimenting with the boundaries of Zombies much earlier than today’s larger and more complex versions of the game mode would suggest.
Zombies remains one of Call of Duty’s biggest co-op components, originally appearing in World at War as a bonus before becoming a significant part of the series after Black Ops. What started as a small mode grew in scale with Black Ops Zombies’ post-launch maps like Ascension, Call of the Dead, Shangri-La, and Moon, transforming Zombies from a survival mode into an ongoing saga with elaborate Easter eggs, recurring characters, interconnected locations, and an overarching storyline. Black Ops’s Zombies mode in 2010 demonstrated that Treyarch had a willingness to experiment with the game type, either with celebrity guests or increasingly elaborate quests, and the newly uncovered defense mode naturally fits into that history as an attempt to see what could be done under the Zombies framework.
Although it never reached the original game’s playable content, the new Black Ops ports on PS5 have now found some unexpected value, especially for fans interested in prototypes and how games evolve during development. This discovery gives players a rare look at ideas that studios test and abandon before release, and helps preserve parts of Black Ops history that might otherwise remain hidden. More than 15 years after Black Ops first launched, fans are proving that even one of Call of Duty’s most thoroughly explored games may still have a few secrets left to uncover.
- Released
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November 9, 2010
- ESRB
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M For Mature 17+ due to Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language
- Engine
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