Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare (2007)

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is Infinity Ward's 2007 shooter that effectively reset the entire FPS market and pulled the franchise out of WWII into present-day combat. The cinematic single-player campaign follows two parallel protagonists — Sergeant Paul Jackson of the U.S. Marines 1st Force Recon and Sergeant John "Soap" MacTavish of the British 22nd SAS Regiment — through interlaced missions against a rogue ultranationalist threat led by Khaled Al-Asad and Imran Zakhaev, who have obtained a nuclear weapon and intend to use it.

The campaign included missions that became immediately iconic — "All Ghillied Up," "Charlie Don't Surf," "Death From Above" — and the dual-protagonist structure let the game alternate between ground-level firefights, sniper infiltrations, urban breaching and AC-130 gunship sequences without any single scenario overstaying. More than 70 modern-day weapons and pieces of equipment populate the arsenal, with night-vision goggles, claymore mines, .50-caliber sniper rifles and ghillie suits providing the tactical texture.

The multiplayer suite is what reset the market. The create-a-class system, persistent ranked progression with experience points and unlocks, perks, killstreak rewards, the matchmaking infrastructure, and a leaderboard layer became the foundation for the way the entire genre worked for the next decade. The game introduced design conventions — perks, kill cams, unlockable cosmetics tied to player progression — that the broader online shooter market collectively adopted within a few years. The cinematic single-player remains the strongest in the franchise's history; the multiplayer remains the most-imitated.