Call of Duty: Black Ops is a decades-spanning tale of deception, betrayal, and questionable psychiatry. It’s just one of CoD’s several separate subseries, but it’s by far the beefiest.
Back in 2010, it would have been easy for developer Treyarch to whip up some jungle assets and ship Call of Duty 7: Vietnam, but instead it unleashed a sprawling techno-thriller with all-you-can eat acronyms in which half of the characters are hallucinations and the rest are historical figures up to no good.
Black Ops is where Call of Duty gets weird– a stylish head trip with plot twists to spare. There’s a century’s worth of storyline in this epic espionage saga with more on the way, so consider this your pre-mission briefing ahead of Black Ops 7. Here is everything you need to know about the Black Ops story so far.
BLOPS is a twisted web of flashbacks, dream sequences, and choice-driven alternate endings, so we’re charting the most chronological and canonical path we can. It begins with a World at War.
1942
Stalingrad, September 1942. Red Army soldier Dimitri Petrenko claws his way through streets of corpses guided by his comrade, Soviet sniper Viktor Reznov. Reznov’s father was killed by the Nazis, creating in him a thirst for payback so deep that not even death will quench it.
1945
Petrenko and Reznov blast into Berlin and plant the hammer and sickle atop the Reichstag in 1945. Black Ops 1 reveals their post-war fates. Treacherous officer Nikita Dragovich and his pet sadist Lev Kravchenko drag our heroes into a task force hunting German scientist Friedrich Steiner– the evil genius behind a doomsday nerve gas called Nova 6. They corner the unrepentant jerk in the Arctic Circle where Steiner defects, to Reznov’s disgust.
Dragovich betrays Reznov and gasses his men with the Nova 6, killing several including our POV character from World at War. Reznov is rescued by the British but sinks the Nova stockpile beneath the ice.Dragovich, Kravchenko, and Steiner escape with the formula. Reznov is recaptured and sent to the Vorkuta prison camp where he waits 16 years for a new protagonist to bro out with.
1961
During the Bay of Pigs invasion, the United States supports a coup that fails to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government. In real life, the U.S. provided funding, training, and air support for the revolution. In Black Ops 1, the CIA sends some special ops assassins to eliminate Castro: Alaskan Marine Alex Mason, Navy Seal Joseph Bowman, and chain-smoking, nigh unkillable veteran Frank Woods. Mason and Woods become the bedrock characters of BLOPS. Bowman, not so much.
Treyarch’s trio take down El Commandante’s body double. Mason is captured and taunted by an alive and well Fidel. Castro hands his prisoner over to returning Soviet heavies Kravchenko and Dragovich, who throw him in the gulag at Vorkuta.
The bad guys rewire Mason’s brain to become a sleeper agent controlled by a cryptic numbers station. Mason resists with the help of Reznov, his lone ally in the bowels of the Russian prison– Shawshank Redemption in a Soviet labor camp. As the men bond, Reznov programs a backdoor into Mason’s brain, compelling him to annihilate Steiner, Kravchenko, and Dragovich by any means necessary.
1963
Reznov engineers an uprising with a catchy 8-step plan that doubles as a conditioning tool. Big Vik sacrifices his own freedom so Mason can catch the last train out of Vorkuta, ending his two year imprisonment.
The extremely traumatized Mason is assigned to handler Jason Hudson and summoned to the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara briefs them on Dragovich’s plans while Mason, who probably should have taken some self care PTO, starts to unravel. Mason’s mental breakdown crescendos when he meets John F. Kennedy as Dragovich’s programming surfaces.
Despite the fact that he just crashed out in front of the President, Mason’s bosses send him to sabotage the Soyuz space program and torch the team of Nazi scientists working on Nova 6. The team rescues double-agent Grigori Weaver, who loses an eye in the process. He doesn’t have a massive role beyond BLOPS 1, but he plays a pivotal part in the Zombies’ Dark Aether Saga– one of many characters who found new life within the mode.
Most operators would call it a day there, but because of Reznov’s programming, Mason literally cannot stop until he finds and ends Dragovich. The gang blows up his limo but they bail before the kill is confirmed.
Five days later, President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Mason is present at the scene, but the CIA is quite unbothered by the brainwashed killing machine’s proximity to the crime of the century and keeps him on the payroll.
1968
In Vietnam, Mason joins up with old buddies Woods and Bowman in search of Soviet intel on Nova 6. Mason meets with a defector that he believes is Viktor Reznov and they survive a lot of action setpieces together. The crew eventually arrives in Laos to secure a crashed plane carrying a cargo of Nova 6, but the gas is gone when they arrive.
VC and Spetsnaz troops ambush team BLOPS and force them to play Russian Roulette in a gruesome homage to The Deer Hunter. After Bowman is brutally murdered, Mason and Woods fight their way free, hijack a Hind, and bust up Kravchenko’s headquarters, saving “Reznov” once again. Woods sacrifices himself to save Mason from the cornered Kravchenko, and both men are presumed dead. In true Call of Duty fashion, neither are.
Meanwhile, Weaver and Hudson make contact with Dr. Steiner, who is now terrified of Dragovich and desperate to flip on him. He reveals that Dragovich is hours away from ordering sleeper agents to unleash Nova 6 across the U.S., provoking nuclear war. Hudson and Weaver rush to Steiner’s lab on Rebirth Island, but Mason and his guardian angel beat them to it. They infiltrate the facility on their own and find Steiner. Reznov executes the Nazi scientist, but that’s not what Hudson and Weaver see. Mason is alone, and they watch him pull the trigger.
Hudson and Weaver take Mason in and race to unravel his severely compromised brain to stop World War 3. Their desperate interrogation makes up the iconic frame narrative of Black Ops 1. “The numbers, Mason!” ranks among Call of Duty’s most immortal lines– right up there with “50,000 people used to live here” and “f***ing campers.”
We learn the truth: Reznov died in Vorkuta and the disgruntled old soldier who’s been following Mason around is a Fight Club-style figment of his imagination.
Mason decodes the sequence and leads a strike on Dragovich’s undersea numbers station. In the final showdown, Mason strangles Dragovich and puts an end to his decades-spanning plot. This will not be the last of Mason’s problems.
With Black Ops in the bag, we leap forward four games in the release order to Black Ops: Cold War, set in the brief window of the 1980s before the flashback sequences of Black Ops 2. Dragovich is dead, Mason is half out of his mind, and a new figure named Persus has emerged from the ashes.
1981
Soviet spymaster “Perseus” amasses power and creates his own rogue intelligence network to sow discord across the world. By 1981, they’ve stolen an American-made nuclear bomb courtesy of Operation Greenlight, an extremely dubious top-secret program that hid scorched-earth nukes all across Europe.
Woods is back in action after blowing up and escaping from a POW camp. Hudson asks him to join Mason and new super spy guy Russell Adler to hunt down Perseus for the CIA. They capture an injured Perseus lieutenant and bring them in for some light MKULTRA. M16 agent Helen Park helps implant the Perseus agent with false memories of serving with Adler in Vietnam in order to exploit them for intel.
Reborn as “Bell,” the new player character joins Adler’s team, where they are kept in check with a “would you kindly” style control phrase: “We’ve got a job to do.” They gather a CIA Scooby gang and uncover a Spetsnaz training ground dressed up like an idyllic American suburb, complete with an arcade and period-appropriate Doritos. They confirm the stolen nuke was of U.S. origin, and learn the truth about Operation Greenlight– and their boss’s role in it.
Hudson was not only aware of the plan, he was in charge of it. The squad shelves their beef and plots to steal a list of sleeper agents from KGB headquarters in Moscow.
With the help of a mole named Belikov, Adler and Bell infiltrate the Lubyanka and cross paths with Mikhail Gorbachev and a bunch of Soviet spooks, including young Imran Zakhaev, the future final boss of Modern Warfare. The two series don’t cross over very often, but there are sporadic hints that the worlds of Treyarch and Infinity Ward aren’t as separate as they seem.
The agents go loud and escape with the sleeper list, which points them to a Greenlight scientist named Hastings. By the time they find him it’s too late– Perseus has the activation codes.
Adler abandons his totally subtle mind-meld scheme and force-feeds drugs directly into Bell’s brain instead. Their past as a Perseus agent resurfaces along with the location of the secret base.
The story can go a few different ways from here, but as far as canon is concerned, Bell lets Adler’s intrusion slide and gives up the real location. The team destroys Perseus’ monastery stronghold and secures the nukes, but the man himself escapes. Hudson, wanting to clear up any loose ends, orders Adler to execute Bell as the story concludes.
Cold War sits awkwardly in the Black Ops timeline– you’d think someone would mention the whole “seeding a continent with nukes” thing over the next few decades of the story. Still, the retcon works, and characters like Park will pop up in future games.
The real main event of Black Ops in the 1980s isn’t Perseus, however– it’s Black Ops 2‘s Raul Menendez, a ruthless arms dealer turned charismatic cult leader locked in a 40-year blood feud with Mason and Woods.
1986
Alex Mason has retired to Alaska’s frozen tundra, raising his son David and being generally irritable. He should try mushing wolf-dogs. Ex-handler Hudson and Oliver North come a-knocking with one last job: “Uncle” Woods has gotten himself captured again while messing around in the Angolan civil war.
Mason and Hudson rescue Woods and in the process Mason crosses paths with an ice-cold young arms dealer named Raul Menendez. The men scuffle, Mason shoots his eye out and leaves him for dead.
At this point in his career, Mason has slaughtered entire legions of hostile NPCS. What difference does one more gun-runner make? But Menendez survives with a gnarly scar and swears vengeance on the spook.
Raul was raised during Nicaragua’s dirty wars, watching U.S. backed Contras tear his homeland to shreds. His animosity towards America became personal when his beloved sister Josefina was nearly burned alive by a greedy American businessman.
Raul and his father built a massive drug cartel that attracted the ire of the CIA. The agency merced Papa Menendez in front of his son, which further soured Raul’s feelings towards the United States.
By 1986, he’s running arms with the Soviets in Afghanistan. Mason and company are sent to intervene, linking up with local freedom fighters and a Chinese contact named Tian Zhao. They survive a Soviet attack led by Lev Kravchenko, last of the Dragovich loyalists.
The sight of Kravchenko does a number on Mason’s, let’s face it, completely cooked brain, but it’s Woods who canonically delivers the killshot after they learn about a mole in the CIA.
The Mujahideen leader turns on the Americans under orders from Menendez, leaving the squad to die in the desert. A delirious Mason sees “Tricky Vik” Reznov ride in on horseback to save the day.
The CIA finds the Menendez family compound in Nicaragua and cuts a check to Manuel Noriega, the real-life Panamanian dictator on the U.S. payroll. Noriega’s goons storm the compound and brutalize Josefina. Raul goes berzerk. Noriega shoots his own men and lets Menendez go as a favor, which Raul returns by nearly beating the general to death.
When they finally meet, Woods hurls a grenade meant for Raul, but a bad bounce means it kills Josefina instead. Raul survives, and vows that Woods, and the entire world, will one day feel his absolute loss. Three years later, Menendez puts his plan into motion.
1989
The U.S. invades Panama with the aim of overthrowing Noriega. In real life, Noriega was smoked out of the Vatican embassy by Van Halen music on loop. In BLOPSworld he’s captured by (who else?) Mason and Woods. Hudson informs his men that Noriega is a “high-value individual” to be exchanged for an anonymous prisoner.
Hudson tells Woods that the hooded captive is Raul Menendez, and orders him to shoot the restrained prisoner during the swap. To Woods’s horror, the man is really Alex Mason, and while the canon isn’t absolutely clear about this, it’s widely believed that Mason is no more.
Afterwards, the real Menendez appears, blows away Woods’s kneecaps, and reveals that he’s kidnapped Mason’s son David. Menendez used the boy as leverage to force Hudson to do his bidding. He slits Hudson’s throat with Josefina’s locket, leaves David traumatized, and spares Woods to suffer with the guilt of killing his closest friend.
In one fell swoop, two lead characters from the previous Black Ops game were wiped off the board and another horribly mutilated, leaving young David to pick up the pieces– a story to which we’ll return after a detour through the early ‘90s for Black Ops 6.
Woods spends the intervening years riding a desk and raising David as best he can without revealing the truth behind his father’s death. The CIA believes that Russell Adler is the mole, paid off by Menendez to teamkill his CoD clan. Woods doesn’t buy it, and suspects a shadow faction inside the agency itself: Pantheon.
Pantheon began as a CIA subdivision in the ‘70s, experimenting with a psychotropic super-soldier serum called Project: Cradle. After a disastrous outbreak of the Cradle virus turned survivors into hallucinating rage monsters, Deputy Director Daniel Livingstone officially disavowed it.
The group reformed as an independent rogue cabal, reviving Cradle in secret while fanning the flames of America’s forever wars.
Speaking of which, grab your best bootleg Bart Simpson shirt and get ready to rip some packs of Gulf War generals, because it’s 1991 and we’re invading Iraq… the first time.
1991
Wheelchair-bound Woods is fielding a new team: his protege Troy Marshall, ops specialist Jane Harrow, and the enigmatic William “Case” Calderon. The squad is tasked to extract Saddam Hussein’s defecting defense minister Saeed Alawai, but their target is executed on the spot by fugitive Russell Adler.
Adler insists that the CIA is compromised, and says he couldn’t allow the man to fall into Pantheon’s clutches. He surrenders himself with a simple riddle for Woods: “Bishop takes Rook.” Livingstone dismisses his warning and suspends the squad, who decide to follow Adler’s trail anyway.
“Rook” refers to an old KGB safehouse in Bulgaria that Adler and Woods discovered during their adventures in the ‘70s. The disgraced team shacks up there and recruits some new allies: German tech guy Felix Neumann and Sev Dumas, an assassin from the fictional city-state of Avalon. She was trained and betrayed by the Guild, an underground criminal network that will become way more important in the sequel.
With the gang assembled, they break out Adler from a CIA black site deep beneath the U.S. Capitol building while Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton works the room at a glitzy gala upstairs..
Back at the Rook, Adler explains that Pantheon was in bed with Hussein, trading experimental weapons for access to his definitely-real WMD facilities. He tells them about Cradle and where they might find it. Next stop: Saddam’s palace.
With help from Cold War’s Helen Park, the rogue BLOPers infiltrate Hussein’s gilded bunker. Among his hoard of treasures, the squad finds a sample of Cradle. They also discover that Jane Harrow is Pantheon’s mole within the CIA and trace the virus’s origin to a research facility on American soil.
When they arrive in Kentucky, Case falls down an elevator shaft and is exposed to the Cradle, experiencing a Zombie nightmare.
Case overcomes his BLOPs protagonist amnesia and unlocks his past– he was the failed original test “case” for a Cradle-powered super-soldier. The project was scrapped, his memories were erased, and he was welcomed back into the loving arms of the CIA, which remains oddly unconcerned with the scrambling of its employees’ minds.
A casino heist points the squad towards Gusev, Harrow’s Cradle scientist. He’s hiding out in Kuwait, so Case, Adler, and Lawrence Sims, another Cold War veteran, ground his flight.
Gusev tells the gang that Pantheon’s headquarters is located in an old Soviet prison camp– Victor Reznov’s old haunt Vorkuta, ground zero for the entire Black Ops saga.
In the most shameless nostalgia fest since Snake returned to Shadow Moses, team Rogue BLOPs revisits the gulag and apprehends the traitorous Harrow. They dose her with truth serum and drag the whole story out of her: She blames Adler for the home-invasion deaths of her parents and joined Pantheon for revenge.
Their master plan is to use the Cradle for a false-flag terror attack on Washington, D.C. The Iraqis would take the fall, Livingstone would be KIA, and Harrow/Pantheon would be in charge of the CIA.
Pantheon invades the Rook, setting off a climactic safehouse standoff. Harrow attempts to escape on a helicopter, but Case boards her vessel mid-flight. Completely geeked on Cradle, Case strangles Harrow in a blind rage and sends the chopper crashing into a river, where both are presumed dead. Sure they are!
Livingstone makes peace with Woods, Adler, and Marshall and encourages them to hang out their shingle as an off-the-books Black Ops cell. In a final stinger, we see that Pantheon is down but not out as another mole, Jackson Caine, slips into Livingstone’s office and hacks into his computer.
The story continues 44 years later in Black Ops 7, but first there’s the matter of Menendez to attend to.
In 2014, a social movement named Cordis Die emerges from the internet. Its charismatic leader Odysseus gains followers with his impassioned rants against the corrupt 1%. He engineers riots in Iran and North Korea and develops an unstoppable computer worm out of the rare earth metal Celerium with the help of hacker Chloe Lynch.
He uses it to hack the Chinese stock exchange in 2018, pinning the blame on the U.S. and triggering a second cold war between NATO and China amid an escalated drone arms race. Mason’s former ally Tian Zhao is in charge of China’s SDC and working with Menendez, combining their vast resources to heat up the conflict and usher in a new world order.
2025
By the far off distant future of 2025, Cordis Die has amassed two billion followers, none of whom realise their cult leader is the Nicaraguan narco-terrorist, and that the entire “Occupy BLOPS” movement was just a cover for one man’s mad-on against Woods and Mason. Young David Mason is now a Navy Seal operator named “Section” who still checks in on his dear old Uncle Frank.
Menendez makes the first move by visiting a still-living, still-smoking Woods in the Vault, a retirement home for Mimis and Pop Pops with red in their ledger. He leaves behind the pendant used to murder Hudson.
Section and his JSOC boys Mike Harper and Javier Salazar visit Woods for some action-packed ‘60s flashbacks. The old man gives them the dirt on his tragic history with Menendez and clues them in about Celerium. The young bucks embark on a series of missions investigating Menendez, and his massive mercenary army.
The gang eavesdrops for intel about a cyber weapon called “Karma.” Section, Harper, and Salazar search for it on the decadent floating city of Colossus, where they discover that “Karma” is actually Chloe Lynch, and that Menendez is trying to kill her to keep her quiet about the Celerium computer worm.
Her fate has yet to be confirmed by canon, but if they do save Karma from top henchman DeFalco, she uncovers Menendez’s ultimate plan: on June 19th, Freedom Day, he’s going to hijack the U.S. military’s drone system and unleash an electronic rumbling on every major city within both global superpowers. That’s tomorrow.
Over Section’s objections, his commander Admiral Briggs decides it’s high time to grab Menendez. They contact Farid, a deep cover operative observing Menendez ignite a revolution in Yemen. Farid sacrifices himself to save Harper and Melendez is easily captured and taken onboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Barack Obama.
Surprise! We were playing right into Menendez’s brilliant ruse the entire time. It’s the “getting caught was part of my plan” gambit that was all the rage in the late aughts, though to be fair, Black Ops 2 scribe David S. Goyer also wrote the screenplay for the trope-defining Dark Knight.
Cordis Die goons storm the Obama and Menendez seizes control of the ship with the help of his double agent, your now ex-BFF Salazar. He uploads the virus and takes over the U.S. military drone network before escaping.
Since canon presumes you completed the bonus Strike Missions and took down Tian Zhao, Chinese planes will save the ship and ally with JSOC against the drones, ending the cold war for good.
As thousands of metal death machines swarm upon populated cities, Section, Harper, David Petraeus, and the President of the United States are shot down in a war-torn Los Angeles. Under siege by an army of killer drones, the men escort POTUS to safety in one the most spectacular setpieces in a series that has a lot of them.
JSOC and China trace the drone control signal to a Cordis Die facility in Haiti and stage a full-scale invasion. Menendez goes live when they arrive, but instead of destroying the world’s cities he blows up every single one of the drones instead, crippling American military infrastructure.
Section finally captures his father’s murderer and makes a martyr out of Menendez– which is exactly what he wanted. He posts a posthumous YouTube video instructing his billions of followers to take advantage of the drone-free power void and seize control of the United States.
Treyarch has been pretty firm that the “Menendez dies” ending of Black Op 2 is canonical, although his promised Cordis Die uprising fizzles out.
2035
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is set a decade after the end of BLOPS 2. Frank Woods has finally gone to that old soldiers’ home in the sky and David Mason is still dorkily calling himself Section and leading a new team named “Specter One,” with old faces like Harper and Marshall and new ones like the bionic 50/50.
The world is still shaken from the drone incident. The Guild has shed its shady beginning and is reborn as a powerful tech giant offering protection in uncertain times. In 2035, the dead Menendez shocks the world with a prophecy and a threat: in three days, your streets will run red with your blood. He’s presumably referring to a new fear-based macguffin that pushes minds to the edge of consciousness with typical Black Ops trippiness.
It’s a “five minutes into the future” setting, a touch more sci-fi than Modern Warfare but closer to a tomorrow that seems just around the corner. It’s not the first time that Black Ops has moved forward in the timeline, and it’s nowhere close to the giant leap taken by Treyarch for Black Ops 3.
2062
Set in 2062, Black Ops 3 is the odd duck in an already pretty weird franchise. It depicts a surreal, Phillip K. Dickian future that’s been forged in the fallout of Cordis Die’s drone war, where the old geopolitical order has collapsed and optimized into two bloated megafactions locked in endless proxy wars. New technology makes air supremacy obsolete. Mechs roam the battlefield, and wallrunning supersoldiers interface directly with the grid.
Black Ops 3’s campaign is ambitious and strange, but it feels less like the next chapter in the Black Ops saga and more of an optional epilogue, the kind of ending you’d reload a save to avoid. There’s connective tissue to the larger mythos, but none of the classic characters or grudges survive the time skip. Also, BLOPS being BLOPS, most of the action turns out to be the digital experiences of a disembodied dying consciousness inside a simulation.
While there’s no reason to doubt its canonicity, Black Ops 3 is not the focus of Black Ops 7– The latest title has far too much unfinished business in the past to linger in the far-flung future. Still, the slow drift towards sci-fi is undeniable, and it makes total sense: Black Ops has spent the last 15 years strip-mining the shadow wars of the 20th century, and there’s really only one direction left to go.
Will Black Ops lose its psycho wetworks swagger if it moves beyond the current day? Is there still more juice to squeeze from our clandestine past? Or is it time for Treyarch and Raven Software to invent something entirely new? After all, if we learned anything from Call of Duty: Black Ops, it’s that identities are anything but permanent.
