Later this year, EA's rebooted Medal of Honor will compete against Activision's Call of Duty, bringing the two head-to-head for the first time in a few years. In the PS2 era, the two were nearly on an even level, and it wasn't until the current generation that Medal of Honor fell to Call of Duty, mostly thanks to Infinity Ward's dominance with Call of Duty 2 and the final nail in the coffin, Modern Warfare. For some time, it seemed as though it was going to be an easy win for Activision, and there was little reason to believe that the reboot would be able to top the $1 billion earner in CoD. However, recent happenings make this seem like more and more of a possibility, and there's historical evidence that EA may be ready to overtake Call of Duty in 2010, or at least take back some ground.

In the fall of 2007, Electronic Arts and Black Box Studios released Skate, the first big-budgeted extreme sports game to go up against the extremely popular Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, headed by Activision and Neversoft. The most recent game in the series, at that time, was Project 8, which came packaged with revamped controls and fantastic graphics. Skate's work was cut out for it, especially considering that Project 8 was one of the highest rated games in the series. When it finally came out, Skate destroyed the Tony Hawk series, outselling it, and eventually leading to Activision releasing the Hail Mary that was Tony Hawk's Ride. As most people will admit, it was a failure, and left Skate as the unchallenged leader of the genre. A similar tale follows Harmonix with Rock Band, and while Guitar Hero still sells more, the gap becomes lower every year. Recently, Activision had to lay off a large chunk of staff, and commented that the music genre might be in a decline.



Now, we can start to look at the last few Call of Duty titles. The series really became an unstoppable force with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which shocked the world when it took on Halo 3 and walked out victorious in 2007. Suddenly, the Call of Duty series moved from "that World War II shooter" to a force to be reckoned with, something that was almost reset with the next CoD release, Treyarch's Call of Duty: World at War. While World at War was, in no way, a bad game, it worked against the series, and had three negative effects:

1. It brought the series back to World War II, reestablishing the stigma it worked so hard to get around.
2. Convinced Activision that the engine and title were strong enough to stand on their own without Infinity Ward.
3. Pissed off Infinity Ward.

Pissing off Infinity Ward didn't stop them from making Modern Warfare 2, which was, obviously, extremely popular, winning slews of Game of the Year awards and selling $1 billion, number two entertainment property behind James Cameron's Avatar. It did, however, plant the seeds of dissent, and the heads of IW were recently fired for a number of reasons that all translate to "we didn't like your attitude." There's still a Call of Duty in development for 2010, but it's being developed by Treyarch, and comes at a time where the Activision name is so bad that it makes the Call of Duty name worse by relation, and many are saying that they don't even plan on picking up anything more in the series. This leads us to...



Medal of Honor. With singleplayer developed by EA Los Angeles, and multiplayer being handled by Battlefield developer DICE, Electronic Arts is acting as though Medal of Honor is their Call of Duty. In fact, they seem to be taking the elements that worked in CoD and implementing them in their game, leading many to call it a rip-off. Either way, there has never been a better time for Electronic Arts to throw a big-budgeted shooter onto the market. Opinions of Activision have never been lower, and the only thing keeping remaining Infinity Ward staffers from walking out the door is the upcoming downloadable content and unpaid bonuses. Come April, it would be a shocker if the remainder of the development studio stayed, which means there's little of the soul left in Call of Duty.

There's still very little known about the multiplayer of Medal of Honor, and the singleplayer campaign is still unproven, but there's a good chance that EA's shooter can take a large chunk of Call of Duty's audience away. There are many that will say that it's impossible, pointing at the sales of Modern Warfare 2 and unpopularity of Medal of Honor: Airborne as proof, though EA seems dead set on going for a hat trick, and adding a notch on their bedpost next to the ones for Skate and Rock Band. Only time will tell.