Dan Bunting, co-head of Treyarch, talks about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
Dan Bunting, co-head of Treyarch, talks about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
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Dan Bunting interview — How Treyarch built battle royale into Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 11 min

Dan Bunting has worked at Treyarch for 15 years, and he picked a heck of a time to become the co-head of the Activsion-owned Call of Duty studio. As Mark Lamia moved up to become studio chairman, Bunting and his cohorts took charge of making the next installment in the multibillion-dollar Call of Duty franchise: Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

As they did so, they found that their ideas for a single-player campaign weren’t coming together. And then battle royale exploded in the spring of 2017 with the launch of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and the subsequent meteoric rise of Fortnite. These games were like comets striking the first-person shooter business that Call of Duty and Electronic Arts’ Battlefield dominated.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. 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.