In a new interview, development veteran and Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey (Dead Space, Call of Duty: WWII) has detailed how a decision on a development partner to handle the PC port of 2002’s 007 Nightfire could have had huge ramifications on the actual existence of the Call of Duty franchise as we know it today. Condrey discussed the matter with writer Cade Onder during the production of a documentary the latter has produced on the making of 2011’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
Back around the early 2000s, Condrey spent eight years working at EA on a number of James Bond games – as a producer on The World Is Not Enough, Agent Under Fire, and Nightfire, and later in a development director role on Everything or Nothing and From Russia With Love.
“GoldenEye sits on this pedestal, as you know, right?” Condrey began. “Arguably one of the greatest, most transcendent shooters on console. And so we were working on the sequel to that, The World Is Not Enough, and from there we continued to build out experiences.
“Eventually in the series order we were working on a title called Nightfire. We were looking for a PC developer. Now this would’ve been 2001, 2002. We were shopping the game for PC developers who could come in and take our console game – we were focussed on consoles at that time – and deliver a PC version. And there were several interesting PC developers we talked to; one of them happened to be Vince [Zampella] and Jason [West].”
At this time, Zampella and West were part of Oklahoma-based developer 2015, Inc., the studio behind 2002’s highly esteemed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, published by EA.
