Footage of an unreleased Call of Duty game codenamed “NX1” has appeared online.
The game was being developed by now-defunct studio Neversoft and would have featured a futuristic setting. It was eventually scrapped and replaced by Call of Duty: Ghosts.
The never-before-seen footage begins with the game’s menus, which look very similar to other Call of Duty games from the time period.
Footage of NX1 was shared on X (formerly Twitter) by user @mangafigurines, who simply wrote “F**k it. NX1.”
It is unknown how they acquired the footage. However, @mangafigurines posted earlier in the day that they were “Gonna tweet NX1 gameplay when I get home to make y’all sad”.
The NX1 footage shows a build of the game from December 2011. It starts by showing the main menu, including the title “Future Warfare”.
Next, we get a look at “Missions”. This includes options for “NX Levels” and “Current Prototypes”, as well as three acts. A mission called “Museum” is also selectable.
After choosing “NX Levels”, a number of missions are shown. Interestingly, one is titled “Operation Deadbolt” – this name would later be used for Modern Warfare III‘s Zombies mode in 2023.
The player then selects the mission “Moonbase Assault” and the “Regular” difficulty setting. The Neversoft logo appears and we get a look at actual gameplay from NX1.
Call of Duty NX1 gameplay
In the gameplay footage of the mission, the player awakens on the moon during a firefight. Their helmet is cracked and soldiers in space suits can be seen running towards a lunar base and being killed.
The player walks slowly towards the base’s entrance and closes its airlock door just before they suffocate. They watch through a window as intruders open another airlock, sending the civilians inside flying out into space.
A commanding officer named Crow instructs the player to get to the base’s armoury over the radio. As the player runs though the base, they narrowly avoid death as various airlocks are breached.
The base’s personnel can be seen being killed by the enemy soldiers. The footage abruptly ends when the player character – apparently called Walker – is informed by Crow that a character called Riggs is coming to meet up with them.
As you might expect, the footage has caught the attention of Call of Duty fans on social media. @mangafigurines’s footage has received 6.8K likes and more than three million views at the time of writing.
Reaction to the leaked NX1 footage has been interesting to say the least. Brian Bright, a former Call of Duty project director and multiplayer lead on NX1, replied to the video shedding some light on the cancelled game.
He said: “This was NX1, after IW imploded and split into Respawn Neversoft pivoted from Guitar Hero to make a futuristic COD game. This mission was on the moon, some experiments with low g and was really about the team learning the engine. We were making GH games on our THPS engine prior.”
Bright continued in a separate tweet: “I believe this would have been in place of Ghosts, trying to remember. We had 2-3 campaign missions, and a bunch of MP work done (I was mp lead on this) before cancellation. One thing we really liked in mp was the first Escort mode in COD. There is footage out there on this”.
NX1 multiplayer footage
The following day, 28 January, X user @catgurlfriend released the multiplayer footage Bright may have been referring to.
The clip is just 45 seconds long and shows a player in a free-for-all match on a map seemingly set in the Middle East. They kill an enemy with akimbo machine pistols before being killed by another player.
The player respawns with an assault rifle and briefly looks around the map before dying again and the footage ends.
While Call of Duty NX1 is now confined to history and will never see the light of day, getting to see footage like this is always a treat for CoD fans.
Every year, fans speculate about where the series will go next. And back in 2011, there were still lots of possibilities. After all, a futuristic Call of Duty had never been done before and NX1 would have been the first.
Instead, we got Ghosts – a decidedly average Call of Duty game. CoD would finally make the jump into the future with Advanced Warfare in 2014.
The series would remain there until 2016’s Infinite Warfare and hasn’t returned since. Perhaps one day CoD will go back to the future and incorporate some of the long-lost ideas from NX1 into new games and Warzone.
What are your thoughts on the Call of Duty NX1 footage? Are you disappointed it was never released? Let us know in the comment section below and don’t forget to check out our other gaming articles.
