Petraeus Makes Poorly-Timed Cameo in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Yannick LeJacq

[WARNING: Mild Spoilers ahead for the “Black Ops 2” single-player campaign.]

David Petraeus may have stepped down as CIA director amid the scandal surrounding his extramarital affair last week, but he’s already been re-enlisted for active duty in one placeâ€"the dystopic near-future of “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2,” which was released on Midnight Tuesday to millions of eager gamers and fans of Activision’s iconic military shooter franchise.

The story for “Black Ops 2,” which was written by David S. Goyer and developer Treyarch’s game director Dave Anthony and advised by seasoned military thinkers like P.W. Singer, combines real-world events from the late eighties (one level has players run around with Manuel Noriega himself) with a possible future “proto-Cold War” set in 2025.

The videogame website Kotaku first posted a clip from one of the “Black Ops 2” single-player campaign cut-scenes that shows Petraeus receiving a terrorist prisoner aboard an aircraft carrier that, incidentally, also happens to be named the “USS Barack Obama.”

Before meeting the game’s primary villain face-to-face, Petraeus talks with Admiral Tommy Briggs about a looming geopolitical conflict:

Briggs: “I have a thousand drones waiting at standby alert ready to launch at my command. If Russia or SDC gets any bright ideas, make no mistake, Secretary Petraeus, your Armed Forces are ready.”

Petraeus: “The last order to DEFCON 3 was given by Secretary Rumsfeld almost 25 years ago.”

Briggs: “I know. I flew a patrol myself.”

In another scene later in the campaign, Patraeus is seated aboard a military plane alongside fictional future Commander in Chief President Bosworth (a character that many critics have noted has an appearance, or at least a haircut, similar to current real-world Secretary of State Hillary Clinton). The plane is attacked by an enemy aircraft while flying over a war-torn version of future Los Angeles, though (SPOILER ALERT), an audio message later informs the player that they survived.

Actor Jim Meskimen is credited with voicing Petraeus in “Black Ops 2.” Previously, he played former President John F. Kennedy in the original “Black Ops,” released in 2010.

Following a long and decorated career in the United States military during which he rose to the level of four-star general and commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus resigned from his position as CIA director last Friday after admitting he’d had an extramarital affair. He was linked to his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

Yet it should be noted that even with Petraeus’s unfortunately timed appearance “Black Ops 2”, Activision and Treyarch are not even the first major media outlets to suffer from bad timing and unplanned awkwardness due to the sudden scandal. Newsweek ran a story on “General David Petraeus’s Rules for Living” last Monday, less than a week before his resignation.

Talking to Speakeasy about the realism and fantasy of military shooters like “Black Ops 2,” Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia recently said, “it’s not important for us to make a perfectly realistic game. It’s important for us to make a really awesome game that feels plausibly authentic.”

“We try to create everything in this world as a very rich, plausibly authentic setting,” Lamia said of his studio’s creative process. “And then we carve our fiction right through it.”

Activision was not immediately available for comment on the story, but a representative from the game publisher told Kotaku that Petraeus was “not involved in making the game.”