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Curated playlist

Military science fiction video games

  • Metal GearMetal Gear became a stealth game because its computer could not handle a gunfight.
  • Halo: ReachHalo: Reach, a video game from the studio Bungie, took in US$200 million on its first day on sale. That set a record for the Halo franchise. Yet the game asked players to defend a planet that the series' own fiction had already declared…
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops 7Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 reached players on the 14th of November 2025, and within weeks its user score on Metacritic had fallen to 1.5. That was the lowest rating any Call of Duty game had ever received on the site. Yet critics were…
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops IIICall of Duty: Black Ops III, the 2015 shooter from the studio Treyarch, was built by a team that once looked at its own progress and saw almost nothing. In March 2026, creative director Jason Blundell recalled that moment. When the…
  • Mass EffectMass Effect began in 2003 as a pitch to build a universe on the scale of Star Wars. BioWare wanted to own it entirely.
  • Gears of WarGears of War begins its fiction with a death toll. The event is called Emergence Day. In only 26 hours, the Locust Horde, a race of subterranean creatures, kills 25% of the population of the planet Sera. From that catastrophe grows a…
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops IICall of Duty: Black Ops II took in more than $500 million in the first 24 hours after it went on sale. That figure made the 2012 first-person shooter the largest entertainment launch of all time. The record stood until Grand Theft Auto V…
  • Call of Duty: GhostsWithin 24 hours of Call of Duty: Ghosts reaching stores in November 2013, Activision had shipped $1 billion worth of copies to retailers. The publisher still counted the game as a letdown. Ghosts was the tenth major Call of Duty release…
  • Halo: Combat EvolvedHalo: Combat Evolved reached shops on the 15th of November 2001, the same day as Microsoft's first game console, the Xbox. Bungie built it, and Microsoft Game Studios published it. A reviewer at Edge magazine called it "the most important…
  • Command & ConquerCommand & Conquer is a real-time strategy video game franchise, and it began with a studio that was fed up with deserts. In 1993, the magazine Computer Gaming World reported that Westwood Studios would not reuse the Dune license for its…
  • Helldivers 2Helldivers 2 begins with a fall. Players drop onto hostile planets inside a metal pod called a Hellpod, launched from a starship known as a Super Destroyer. Once on the ground, they call down bombardments by tapping out sequences of…
  • Doom (franchise)Doom is an American media franchise created by five people: John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud, and Tom Hall. Its hero never receives a proper name. Players call him Doomguy, the Doom Marine, or, in later entries, the…

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