Frontlines is a mod for 2007’s Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare that I started working on the same year, initially just to solve a spawn problem for the New European Regiment, the largest FPS clan that ever existed with divisions all over Europe.
With the ModTools in my hands, I had access to a large part of the game’s source code, and I saw that I could do much more, and go far beyond simple modifications and actually create something that I had always wanted to but never had the means to do. Whether it was because I lost my parents at a young age and had to work hard to support myself without any help, or because of the absurd difficulty of working with games in a country where the market was simply nonexistent.
I saw there a great opportunity to fulfill my big dream of working with games, and that just as my friend Gooseman managed to do with Counter-Strike, if I did something as good as that, I could do it too. So I dove deep into studying the Engine, and because it was derived from Quake, which I had been working on for years, it helped me a lot and accelerated the whole process.
I was so determined to do this that I took 30 days off from my corporate job, and I dedicated each of those days to studying all of Call of Duty‘s code on my own, which at that time there were no tutorials or even videos on YouTube.
At that time, there was a very small community left over from COD2, but it was entirely based on copying from one game and pasting into another, practically nothing there was new creations. And I wanted to create my own game, and I wanted 100% of Frontlines to be created by me, precisely to be my portfolio and my entry card into the gaming market.
I was obsessed with creating everything I had always imagined would be amazing in an FPS game and removing everything I didn’t like in COD4 or modifying and improving it to how I thought it should be.
One of the things that caught the players’ attention the most was the creation of the War Server, which were the old Blood Wars that I had created in Quake 2 but at the time were controlled by scripts, and were not automated at all. Here I could recreate them but at a very high level, fully automated and with much more, which I could not do in the past due to script limitations. I had also done the same in Medal of Honor Allied Assault Spearhead.
For the War Server to work I would need to create several gametypes that soon became dozens, but there was a big problem, I was new to the community, the only one outside the North America/Europe axis, and the Mappers already made their maps for the mods known in the community, and without them making specific maps for my new gametypes this would never work. That’s when I created a method to create everything according to each gametype at map loading time, so no mapper would need to do absolutely anything for their maps to work in my mod, it would work with both the old maps and any map that would be created in the future. Problem solved.
With that, Frontlines started to become quite popular very quickly, because in addition to being a mod that really brought new content to the FPS world, it was compatible with thousands and thousands of maps. It soon became very popular in NER and initially spread mainly across Germany and Francewith several servers, which were always full.
In 2008, a German player suggested my mod as a topic for the most famous podcast about FPS games at the time, Bash and Slash, where big names from the Call of Duty community, including developers, used to come and join. I was invited to participate and, even though my English was still very rudimentary, it was by far the most watched episode of the time, only surpassed by the episode in which Robert Bowling (FourZeroTwo) from Infinity Ward revealed the end of dedicated servers on PC, which meant the end of modtools, custom maps and much more. This spread quickly and went viral and was a bombshell for the entire Call of Duty community on PC, which later even led to a boycott of MW2 sales in 2009.
In the episode I participated in, I had revealed several new features that I was implementing and everyone was already testing them online on the servers I managed in several countries, including the largest in Latin America for my clan Blood Culture. I believe what caught the most attention was because everything that was being put on Frontlines was really new, especially of course, the War Server.
We talked for more than 2 hours and what was published afterwards was very summarized, as was what was published on the website.
With that, there were soon servers all over Europe and North America, and even entire communities dedicated to Frontlines, mainly in Germany, Russia, Canada, France, USA, Portugal, Spain and Netherlands. Even Black Monkeys, who ended up becoming famous for their incredible Star Wars mod in 2011, was a Frontlines community, and that’s why I was invited by them to make the new gametypes for the Galactic Warfare mod.
But early in 2009, Frontlines was chosen by Bash and Slash as the Best Call of Duty mod of 2008, and was given the nickname EPIC MOD, due to the absurd amount of content and innovations. Then everything exploded in ways I could never have imagined, not even in my wildest dreams. Gaming magazines and websites were looking for interviews and to launch Frontlines, in addition to the websites also on the CDs/DVDs that came with the magazines. Everything seemed to be going incredibly well.
With the confirmation that there would be no ModTools for MW2, I decided to continue working on Frontlines. And taking advantage of the relative success of my HER Airborne mod in Medal of Honor, I introduced parachutes in an FPS multiplayer for the first time in history, in an active way that actually made sense for the gameplay. Frontlines R3L04D was released in 2010 with even greater success. Everyone wanted to parachute and explore all the well-known maps in a different way.
Over the years, new Gametypes, Modes and Features were added, all supporting everything that had been created previously and, of course, 100% compatible with the War Server.
When we reached Gametype number 30, we came up against the engine’s limit of no longer supporting Gametypes, so Double Gametypes were created to overcome this limit. Another major obstacle was the amount of memory allocated to receive the mod code, which was also exceeded, causing crashes. To solve this, practically the entire backbone of the game’s core was rewritten in a more efficient way to make more space and thus be able to include more content.
Therefore, behind all the innovations in terms of gameplay, there was a constant war with the engine’s limits, which were all overcome, elevating Frontlines to something absurdly superior to what the original Engine was capable of delivering.
After many requests from players for Frontlines versions for other games in the series, versions were developed for World at War, Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops and even a version for the Galactic Warfare mod.
Since none of these games had as many maps available to play as there were in COD4, everything became very repetitive, even with the Frontlines random options that already existed at the time.
This led me to develop what became known as the Forever Concept, taking advantage of the same system that I already used to load Gametypes during map loading, to generate different positions for objectives in a much more diverse way than what already happened in the first versions of Frontlines, reaching an average of 4 million combinations in a single medium map and in a single gametype, and reaching incalculable numbers if we take into account larger maps and all their Gametypes and Modes.
This has been implemented in all versions of Frontlines, but in the main version it has gone much further, making it so that each game is probably the only time you will ever see that exact game, that you will be able to play it every day of your life, and it will never happen again. Because the probability of it happening again is extremely small. I myself have only seen it happen once in over 15 years of Frontlines.
So when you play Frontlines you should enjoy and make the most of your game, because it will probably be the last time in your life that you will play exactly this way. That’s why Frontlines is the most vast, complete and diverse FPS ever made in gaming history.
And to finish this summary about Call of Duty Frontlines, it was the basis for the creation of Call of Duty Rio, closing this incredible journey with a flourish, after more than 16 years on the road.
Impact
Frontlines had an overwhelming impact on the FPS world, to the point that practically no FPS released after 2008 had at least something that was created, developed or improved in Frontlines.
The Help Mode that was first used in World at War’s Nazi Zombies spread to practically all cooperative games in the world, even though many of them were not FPS games.
It was where the Battle Royale was first introduced in a Call of Duty game and even the map that would become famous many years later and known as Rebirth Island was one of the winning maps in the 2008 Frontlines Map Contest.
It was also where the first Nuke in Multiplayer was created, as well as the Paratroopers, which were actively and importantly introduced in the game.
And of course, the success of Frontlines always had an impact on COD4 sales, which we can even prove by the small sample of active players on Steam during the launches of Frontlines and Call of Duty Rio, despite the vast majority of players playing with the DVD version and not being counted by Steam.
It’s sad to see that this isn’t recognized by most people, who assume that the game that created and popularized all of this was Call of Duty, and Activision does everything it can to keep it that way.
Activision War
Very good, but where is the whole story behind Activision taking over everything that was created in Frontlines without even crediting those who actually created them?
Well, it’s a long story that was being turned into a documentary, but due to pressure and threats from Activision itself towards the presenter and a large Brazilian TV channel, the project was canceled. It seems that they are very afraid that this story will be published.
I have not yet given up my rights and I will never give up. I am still studying the possibility of the documentary being made in another way, as well as the publication of a book, although without the comparative videos it would lose a lot of its impact.
But this story has already been written and will be published eventually, even if it is in a post on Twitter or Reddit. The truth will triumph one day.