Call of Duty: Black Ops III has a funny minigame Easter egg

Treyarch, the developer of Call of Duty: Black Ops III, likes to put gags in its games.

There’s a hub level in-between missions in the game. This is a safe house from which you can upgrade weapons, practice fighting, or study missions. But in one small office on the side, with a computer monitor that has a logo in the upper left corner. The logo is for Coalescence Corp., the private company that is a big part of the plot in the game.

If you go up to the logo and activate it, you’ll unlock an Easter Egg, or hidden inside joke, from Treyarch. It starts playing an arcade game called Dead Ops 2 Arcade. It’s actually a playable mini game played from a top-down view. You’re on a beach, armed with a gun, and zombies start attacking you. You have to find power-ups and try to avoid zombies. You spin your character and then spray fire everywhere. You have to make sure the zombies don’t catch you, and you can upgrade to better weapons.

The game has five levels, and once you finish, you simply return to the safe house. Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops III debuts on Friday on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.