Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, released November 5, 2007, was the franchise's first leap out of World War II — a radical break from the setting that had defined the series. Developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, it became the best-selling game worldwide of 2007, selling over 7 million copies by January 2008 and 13 million by May 2009. The campaign was instantly legendary: the ghillie-suit Chernobyl flashback 'All Ghillied Up,' and the gut-punch moment where your own player-character dies in a nuclear blast mid-campaign — missions still ranked among the genre's best.

But the multiplayer was the revolution. It introduced the architecture that defined shooters for the next decade: XP progression, custom classes with perks, killstreak rewards — UAV at three kills, airstrike at five, helicopter at seven — and Prestige mode, which let you reset it all for a badge. These stopped being novelties almost immediately and became the standard every multiplayer shooter after it either copied or had to explicitly reject. Metacritic scored the console versions 94. From launch until Modern Warfare 2 arrived in 2009, its lobbies were where console gaming lived, and the 2016 remaster only confirmed what everyone already knew: this is the blueprint modern shooters are still building from.