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.
Forget what you know.
Call of Duty® #BlackOps4
Community Reveal Event: May 17, 2018
Global Launch: October 12, 2018 pic.twitter.com/C4lMdo0A7c— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) March 8, 2018
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?
Ya'll are excited for Call of Duty Black Ops IIII and I'm in the future playing Call of Duty Black Ops IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII pic.twitter.com/KuHL9gzWU2
— Brian Altano 🍕 (@agentbizzle) March 8, 2018
Wait but wouldn’t it be Black Ops IV? Why would they title it Black Ops IIII 😂
— TmarTn (@TmarTn) March 7, 2018
https://twitter.com/foolycoolyLDN/status/971348356130836481
“Call of duty Black Ops IIII”
Because Roman numerals are hard
— Cornbread (@CornbreadTTV) March 8, 2018
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?
The reason why it's not Black Ops IV, and is instead "Black Ops IIII", is because, I assume, they're going off of old-fashioned Tally marks. This may also hint at the intention to make a Black Ops 5. pic.twitter.com/MUESchLMDf
— Taffit! (nookexp.bsky.social) 🍃+🎮 (@tanookexp) March 7, 2018
