Pop Culture

Call of Duty’s Oklahoma Origin Story

How a small Oklahoma game studio, a failed trip to Hollywood, and a team of young developers helped launch one of the biggest franchises in entertainment history

Before Call of Duty sold hundreds of millions of copies, before midnight release parties, esports tournaments, celebrity cameos, and Modern Warfare, there was a dark office high inside Tulsa’s CityPlex Towers.

 

 

There was no global franchise yet. No army of thousands of developers. No guarantee that anyone would care.

There was just a relatively small group of people making video games in Oklahoma.

And among them was a young animator named Chance Glasco who, not long before, had been sleeping in his car in Los Angeles trying to find a job.

Today, Call of Duty is one of the most successful video game franchises ever created. In 2024, Activision reported that the series had surpassed 500 million copies sold worldwide, making it the best-selling first-person shooter series in history. (The Washington Post)

But part of the story begins somewhere many players would probably never guess:

Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A Wrong Turn That Turned Out Right

Chance Glasco was born in Tulsa in 1980, although his family moved away when he was young. He grew up in Florida, playing games and experimenting with computers. As a teenager, he even tried reverse-engineering BASIC code on a Tandy computer to figure out how games worked.

After studying computer animation at Full Sail University, Glasco did what a lot of young creatives have done: he headed for Los Angeles.

It did not go particularly well.

For more than a month, he lived out of an old Honda Accord while searching for work. He parked near a Gold’s Gym, hung towels over the car windows to block the streetlights, then used his gym membership to shower and get ready for another day of job hunting.

The entertainment capital of the world wasn’t exactly throwing open its doors.

Eventually, Glasco gave up and started driving east.

But instead of going directly home to Florida, he stopped in Tulsa, where he had family. Months earlier, during another visit, a friend had mentioned something unusual: there was a video game company in town called 2015, Inc.

Glasco reached out.

His pitch was not exactly glamorous.

He told the studio he had recently graduated, showed them the animation work he had, and essentially offered to do whatever was necessary to get through the door.

“I’ll clean your bathrooms,” he remembered telling them during a 2025 oral history interview with OKPOP. “I just want to get my foot in the door.”

He got an unpaid internship.

Within weeks, his career changed.

A Video Game Studio in Tulsa?

2015, Inc. had assembled an unlikely development team in Oklahoma that included programmers, designers, artists, and members of the growing Quake and Doom modding communities.

The project bringing them together was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, a World War II first-person shooter published by Electronic Arts.

Glasco’s earliest assignments were decidedly unglamorous. He animated wounded and dying soldiers during the game’s famous D-Day sequence.

But the work mattered.

Released in 2002, Allied Assault helped push the cinematic possibilities of first-person games. Instead of simply moving a player from target to target, the developers thought carefully about spectacle, pacing, atmosphere, sound, historical detail, and where the player would be looking at any given moment.

Glasco eventually specialized in what became another important part of that immersion: first-person weapon animation.

In a first-person game, he realized, the player usually cannot see much of the character they inhabit. They see hands. Arms. A weapon. The tiny motions happening directly in front of the virtual camera therefore carry enormous weight.

How does a bolt move? How heavy does a weapon feel? How does a magazine lock into place? What does recoil communicate?

Those little details made every project feel physical.

Glasco would continue refining that specialty throughout his years working on Call of Duty.

And Allied Assault also did something else.

It brought together much of the team that would soon create its biggest competitor.

Building Something New

After Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, a large group of developers left 2015, Inc.

Glasco remembers the transition less like the creation of some future corporate giant and more like a group of colleagues who simply wanted to keep making games together.

“I really just wanted to stick with my friends that were responsible for putting together such a great game,” he told OKPOP.

The new team became Infinity Ward.

According to Glasco’s recollection, the group worked for a time from CityPlex Towers, the unmistakable mirrored complex near Oral Roberts University in south Tulsa. He remembers one enormous, dark workspace high in the building, filled with a relatively small development team trying to figure out what came next.

 

 

The team eventually partnered with Activision.

In April 2003, Activision publicly announced Call of Duty, identifying Infinity Ward as a newly formed studio containing 22 developers who had previously worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The idea was to take the cinematic immediacy that team had helped develop and build something new around the experience of ordinary soldiers fighting together rather than the lone, nearly superhuman action hero common to many games. (Activision Investor Relations)

Inside the studio, the process could be remarkably informal.

Glasco recalls early discussions in which almost everyone contributed ideas. Designers read history books and watched war movies and television for inspiration. Band of Brothers became a particular favorite.

They also needed a name.

Glasco remembers “Tour of Duty” floating around before the phrase Call of Duty emerged and stuck.

Think about that for a moment.

A phrase now recognized by gamers around the world was once just another possibility being kicked around by a small group of developers working together.

In Oklahoma.

From Tulsa to the World

There is an important wrinkle to the Oklahoma origin story.

The original Call of Duty was not completed entirely in Tulsa.

Glasco remembers Infinity Ward moving to California roughly midway through development. Los Angeles made collaboration with Activision easier and, at the time, provided access to a much larger pool of experienced game-development talent.

The final game was released for PC on October 29, 2003.

But Glasco has never forgotten where the idea began taking shape.

“A lot of people don’t even know that the Call of Duty franchise was dreamed up and created in the CityPlex buildings,” he told OKPOP.

That is perhaps the great “wait, really?” moment in this story.

Long before Call of Duty became synonymous with enormous production teams and billion-dollar launches, an important part of its creative DNA came together in Tulsa.

The first game quickly proved that the young studio was onto something. Call of Duty earned numerous honors and won Overall Game of the Year at the 2004 Interactive Achievement Awards. Infinity Ward was also recognized as Rookie Studio of the Year at the Game Developers Choice Awards. (GameSpot)

Activision acquired the rest of Infinity Ward in October 2003, just as the first game arrived. (Activision Investor Relations)

Then things got much, much bigger.

Changing the Battlefield

The first Call of Duty games remained rooted in World War II.

Eventually, the Infinity Ward team wanted out.

By Glasco’s telling, the developers had simply spent too many years recreating the same historical period. They began imagining helicopters, flashbangs, contemporary weapons, and modern conflicts.

There was one problem.

Activision reportedly did not think players wanted it.

So the developers built a prototype anyway.

Glasco remembers the team secretly creating a modern-day level to demonstrate what the idea could become. Once executives saw it in action, the project moved forward.

The result was 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a game that transformed both the franchise and the larger first-person-shooter genre.

Two years later, Modern Warfare 2 became a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. Its first five days generated an estimated $550 million in worldwide sales, numbers that put a video game into direct comparison with Hollywood blockbusters. (The Washington Post)

For Glasco, who remembered the days when people had never even heard the words Call of Duty, the scale could be hard to comprehend.

He described the franchise’s rise as a “slow ramp.” First came the questions: Call of what? Then came Modern Warfare. Then records started falling.

The little game studio had become part of a fundamental shift in entertainment itself.

The Oklahoma Part of the Story

It would be easy to tell this story only through sales figures.

That would also miss the best part.

The Oklahoma connection to Call of Duty is not simply that Chance Glasco happened to have been born here.

Tulsa became a turning point in his life.

It was where a failed Hollywood job search became an unexpected opportunity. It was where a young animator got a chance when he was willing to start at the bottom. It was where an unlikely group of developers gathered outside the traditional centers of the entertainment industry. And it was where the beginnings of a creative idea eventually carried far beyond Oklahoma.

Glasco sees the irony now.

“I’m really happy that when I went out to LA the first time, that I didn’t find a job,” he told OKPOP. Had that first plan worked, he doubts his life would have followed the same path.

Failure redirected him.

Tulsa gave him somewhere unexpected to land.

And creativity did the rest.

That is also why Glasco believes stories like this matter for young Oklahomans. A kid interested in animation, game design, programming, sound, or storytelling might assume that meaningful creative work only happens someplace else.

Los Angeles.

New York.

San Francisco.

But Glasco knows firsthand that beginnings do not always respect those maps.

“There’s a lot of pride in just starting up things here,” he said.

The person playing a video game in Oklahoma today may be closer to the next great creative idea than they realize.

After all, one of gaming’s biggest worlds started, in part, with a small team in a dark Tulsa office asking a simple creative question:

What if we made something of our own?

Sources

OKPOP Oral History Collection. Chance Glasco interview, recorded at OKPOP, March 21, 2025.

Activision, April 8, 2003. “Activision Introduces Call of Duty, a New Brand of First-Person Action Games.” The contemporary announcement identifies Infinity Ward as a newly formed studio containing 22 developers from the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault team. Read the Activision announcement.

Activision, October 30, 2003. “Activision Acquires Infinity Ward Developer of Critically Acclaimed PC Game Call of Duty.” Read the acquisition announcement.

Full Sail University. Chance Glasco Hall of Fame profile and career overview. Explore Chance Glasco’s Full Sail profile.

GameSpot, March 5, 2004. “Call of Duty nabs Game of the Year at D.I.C.E.” GameSpot.

GameSpot, March 25, 2004. Coverage of the Game Developers Choice Awards, where Infinity Ward received Rookie Studio of the Year. GameSpot.

The Washington Post, October 30, 2024. Reporting that Activision announced the Call of Duty franchise had surpassed 500 million copies sold. Read The Washington Post story.

Guinness World Records. Call of Duty recognized as the best-selling first-person shooter video game series, with more than 500 million units sold as of October 2024. View the Guinness World Records entry.