This Total Conversion for Call of Duty combines many of Freddy Hajas’ skills into a single project. Game Design, Level Design, Gameplay Design & Programming, AI Design & Programming, Music, Sound Design, Audio Recording & Editing, Localization, Gametypes Design & Programming, Features Design & Programming, Balance, Texturing & Re-Texturing, Hexadecimal Edit to free more memory to work which wasn’t available in the original, Adaptation, Video Editing for the Promos and lots and lots more. Simply Everything except the Modeling and Animations were done by him.
Call of Duty Rio was developed on top of its award-winning Call of Duty Frontlines, elected 3 times as the best Call of Duty mod in the world. Call of Duty Rio also won the same award 2 more times in 2021 and 2022 and became the Highest-rated Call of Duty mod in history, both on Call of Duty and on the ModDB website.






Gameplays
Localization
Having a Dubbing/Localization that wasn’t stupid like most of the ones done here in Brazil was essential to create the immersion I wanted, and I also knew it would have a big impact on the success or failure of the project.
With that, I created a completely non-standard Design to achieve this result, including a new audio bank designed exclusively for this, and using friends to provide a variety of voices in addition to my own.
After Bruno and Coelho from the famous band Biquini Cavadão showed interest in recording these voices even though they didn’t receive anything for it other than the pleasure of participating, something I never thought I would ask for because it would be too much work and time-consuming, I decided to take a risk and invite other celebrities to participate, because others might also be interested in participating in the same way.
And incredibly, I managed to get other big names to participate in the project, which helped a lot in its promotion. The end result was spectacular and far beyond my expectations, being constantly praised by everyone who plays the game, and they elected Call of Duty Rio as the best Brazilian dubbing in the history of video games.
The entire process was explained in the video below (only in Portuguese) in case you are interested in getting a deeper understanding of all the work involved, done with great care and attention to detail.
Network
Media Exposure
Since the early stages of development, Call of Duty Rio has attracted a lot of attention due to the extreme quality achieved even with a very old engine, as well as due to the partnerships with several famous artists and personalities in Brazil. Both national ones, such as the band Biquini Cavadão, and international ones, such as Information Society.





The initial idea was to make available for the first time a completely Brazilian AAA-quality FPS, completely free, still using an old engine, so that the game would be very light and capable of running on practically any PC that could be connected. Released 100% legally under the Activsion license.
Outside of Brazil there was obviously much less exposure since the project was entirely in Portuguese and aimed at the Brazilian public. But even so there were several articles and reviews around the world, almost always very positive, such as on Dark Site Of Gaming, Softonic, Game Preassure and even in Polish on GRY-Online.pl. There were also some small foreign YouTubers/Streamers doing gameplays, reviews and even tutorials.












Feedback

Activision War
As you can see, Call of Duty Rio achieved incredible exposure even without resources, mainly due to the extremely high quality achieved for the first time in Brazil. But Activison, instead of embracing the idea and using it to help promote the next titles in the Call of Duty series in the country, preferred to do absolutely everything, no matter how dirty, to prevent the success from reaching the mainstream.
Since it is an official mod, they could not simply take it down, so they pressured the major media outlets, including all the major gaming websites and the biggest YouTubers and Streamers in the country, to never mention the project. And those who insisted were threatened not to do it or they would receive retaliation.
But that was just the beginning. They started looking for smaller YouTubers/Streamers who talked about the project and offering contracts with explicit clauses not to talk about Call of Duty Rio anymore.
They threatened not to attend the 2022 Brasil Game Show, the largest gaming fair in Latin America, if Call of Duty Rio was presented, demanding at all costs that it never be present. After making sure Call of Duty Rio was left out from BGS, in retaliation for their insistence, they canceled their participation at the last minute, and have not returned to the event since.
They took down Call of Duty Rio‘s networks, claiming that they were pretending to be them in order to gain a commercial advantage over customers (who would have customers if everything was distributed for free?), destroyed a partnership signed with Amazon AWS to host the game’s servers, and perhaps the most desperate of all, was to release not just one, but two maps set in Rio de Janeiro in Modern Warfare 3, despite the game not being set in Brazil, much less in Rio. MW3 became the only Call of Duty in history to have two multiplayer maps that are not set in single-player locations, both of which happened to be in Rio. All of this in a desperate attempt to suppress and sabotage Call of Duty Rio.
Unfortunately, the one with the most money won, although we won all the lawsuits in court, they all ended up in the dumps with a ridiculous fine for them. And these were just a few examples of what happened behind the scenes and continues to happen to this day. It’s a shame to have this attitude from a company I’ve dreamed of working for since I played my first ever game, Seaquest on the Atari 2600.