Why Sledgehammer’s founders wanted to take Call of Duty back to World War II

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
April 26, 2017
Updated June 20, 2025
16 min

Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey feel like Call of Duty: WWII is a personal passion project for the employees in their studio. Sledgehammer Games is making this year’s Call of Duty game, and they’re taking it back to its roots in the Second World War.

In the single-player campaign revealed today, you’ll play as soldiers in a squad in the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division, known as The Big Red One or The Fighting First. The division saw a lot of action throughout the war, starting in North Africa in Tunisia. It moved on to Sicily, Normandy, Aachen, and the Ardennes, the site of the Battle of the Bulge.

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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.