What are you waiting 4?
Call Of Duty games are obviously very popular, having sold somewhere in the area of 300 million copies since the series kicked off back in 2003, and currently stands at around $15 billion in sales.
The most recent entry in the franchise was Call Of Duty: WWII, which brought the game back to the mid-20th century roots, but one of the directions the games have taken is with the Black Ops games, and the trilogy so far (released in 2010, 2012 and 2015, respectively) which spanned back from the Vietnam War to future-set skirmishes, have also proven to be very successful.
So it wasn't a huge surprise that a fourth entry would be on the way, following 2015's Black Ops III.
However, the title did come as a bit of a surprise.
Black Ops IIII.
Not Black Ops IV, as you'd suspect.
https://twitter.com/CallofDuty/status/971808369861259264
With a release date of Friday 12 October - moving from the usual COD release date of mid-November - puts it just a few weeks ahead of the release of Red Dead Redemption II, and from the first teaser trailer, it would appear that... well, there's a lot going on.
But people didn't want to talk about that. They wanted to talk about the title.
Seriously? IIII?
https://twitter.com/agentbizzle/status/971836114997731328
https://twitter.com/TmarTn/status/971182830133891072
https://twitter.com/foolycoolyLDN/status/971348356130836481
https://twitter.com/Cornbread_XBL/status/971811572149563392
Quite why the folks behind the games didn't use IV (or, y'know, 4) isn't entirely clear, but there might be some strategic reason behind it yet.
First of all, some folks at
EuroGamer actually got in contact with someone who works at the British Museum to ask about the Roman numeric system, and apparently both IIII and IV were used, with a preference for Romans at the time using IIII, and that didn't change in general usage to IV until around the 13th century.
So could we be going REALLY far back for CODBOIIII? Seems doubtful.
No, if we were to guess, we'd agree with FatRival's theory about tally marks, and perhaps the intention to make Black Ops 5 the final one?
https://twitter.com/fatrival/status/971284064471744512
