Trivia / Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

• Development Gag: During "F.N.G.", if you retry the CQB test and start doing worse at it, Captain Price may lament that "perhaps it was a mistake to let you skip the obstacle course." This references a large part of "F.N.G.", including an elaborate obstacle course, being Dummied Out. Game Mods have restored the full experience on the PC version (as the audio and scripting necessary were left in the game files and simply needed to be implemented) and the remaster fully puts the obstacle course back in the level, although it's mostly optional.
• Dummied Out:
  • Hackers have found a surprisingly large amount of abandoned content, including different reticule images for every rifle scope (in the released version, all rifle scopes use "scope_overlay_m40a3," but there are seven others, including two for the M21), several abandoned levels including one where the player would have controlled an attack helicopter, and the AT4 rocket launcher, which is in the game but never accessible without cheating.
  • There are other clues about the developer's original intentions hidden within dummied-out weapons - two, the "Brick Blaster" and "Select a location", seem to indicate that Quick Melee would have still involved bashing people across the face with your gun rather than the newly-added knife.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The British campaign's training mission was originally longer, calling back to the very first game's training mission with an obstacle course and an area dedicated to using C4, which can be restored via PC modding. It eventually got restored in the Remastered version. There would have been a mission mimicking the Iranian embassy siege of 1980, which brought the SAS to the public's attention for the first time. Unused sound files suggest the "Mile High Club" bonus mission was part of the main game and involved tracking down a nuclear arms dealer; it was moved to the end of the game as a bonus level, because it was far too difficult for what would have been the first or second real mission.
  • The American campaign was supposed to last for the whole game. Cut missions included piloting a Cobra gunship, being a Marine sniper (hence the M40A3, one of the most popular sniper rifles in multiplayer, being a complete no-show in singleplayer), using parabolic microphones to listen in on enemy chatter, checking dead bodies to identify al-Assad, and controlling Jackson as he scavenges for anti-radiation equipment.
  • A Russian campaign, completing the traditional CoD trifecta, was teased in very early screenshots, but almost nothing is known about it, implying it was cut very early.
  • The bad guys were originally supposed to be Chechen rebels fighting against the Russian state (Zakhaev is straight-up named for a prominent Chechen politician/guerilla), paralleling them with the al-Assad regime as two minority Muslims groups fighting much larger, more traditionally "westernized" superpowers, hence their mutual desire to use nuclear weapons to "even the odds". But when relations between Russia and its breakaway states worsened in real life, the baddies were reworked into "ultranationalists" with a hard-on for Soviet iconography, severing the connective tissue.
  • There were several maps that were intended for the multiplayer but ended up being cut, including "Hill", which looked to be a more direct interpretation of the singleplayer mission "Heat", and night-based versions of Ambush, Strike, District and Overgrown. The Variety Map Pack also had a pair of maps that were cut from it, "Favela" and "Invasion", which later ended up being put into Modern Warfare 2.
  • Several weapons were cut as well, most notably the AT-4, which was actually completed but just never given to you without cheating (many Marines in the single-player campaign can be seen carrying them on their backs, and it would later be added as the starting launcher in MW2), but also strings left over for several others like a MAC-10 (which would later show up in Black Ops in the form of the slightly smaller MAC-11) and more unique versions of the Grenade Launcher (the G36 and G3 were supposed to get the AG36 and HK79; in the released game they just use the M203 like all the other non-AK rifles). The weirdest were the "Brick Blaster" (a USP that threw a brick at whatever you shot) and "Select a location" (an AK with a severely glitched viewmodel), which were apparently cut so early they still have melee animations of your character bashing things with the gun itself rather than using the knife this game introduced; the latter's name has also been suggested to mean that the Tactical Insertion from MW2 on was intended for this game as well.

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