Call of Duty: Heroes

~ the goodbye ~

Activision posted the notice on 23 October 2018 and gave everyone two months. Call of Duty: Heroes would stop working on 22 December, in-app purchases were already suspended, and the store listing came down. Nothing about the game ran locally. Every base layout and every resource counter lived on Activision's servers, so when the date arrived the app opened to an error and never got past it.

It had launched on 26 November 2014, a few months after a soft release in August, and it was a base builder. You laid out an outpost with sentry guns and turrets, then threw waves at other players' bases while gold and oil accumulated on timers you could pay to skip. Clash of Clans was the comparison in every review written about it, and the reviews were tepid. TouchArcade's read was that Supercell had nothing to worry about.

What made it a Call of Duty game was the roster. Captain Price and Soap MacTavish showed up as heroes with their own experience bars and their own killstreak abilities, the Predator missile and the chopper gunner lifted out of the campaign and rebuilt as cooldowns you spent during a raid. Named characters from the single-player story, collected and upgraded, deployed as pieces on a board. Activision would eventually build a very large business on that idea. In 2014 it was a mobile spinoff that nobody at the company appeared to take seriously.

I was thirty when it came out and the timer-and-gem category never got onto my phone. I know what Clash of Clans is the way you know a television series your coworkers keep discussing: secondhand, in summary, never once opened. The distance here is not about Turkey. It is that free-to-play mobile strategy arrived at the exact age when I stopped installing games to find out what they were.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the operators before the operators ~

Five years after Heroes shut down, Call of Duty's business ran substantially on named human beings sold as cosmetic products. Warzone and the Modern Warfare reboots turned Operators into the thing you bought, a face with a voice line and a price attached. Heroes was already doing the recognizable ancestor of that in 2014, except the characters were gameplay pieces rather than outfits, and the revenue came from skipping build timers instead of from a battle pass.

The franchise learned that lesson somewhere. It did not learn it from the game it deleted.

~ what Faceroll was ~

Faceroll Games built it and has one other Call of Duty credit to its name, a second mobile strategy title in the same shape. Outside that the studio is close to invisible in the public record: no widely covered launches, no staff list anybody wrote down, no acquisition story. It is the kind of developer a large publisher uses to put a license into a genre the license does not belong in, and the credit tends not to survive the product.

The timing of the shutdown reads like inventory clearing. Call of Duty: Mobile launched on 1 October 2019, ten months after Heroes went dark, built by TiMi Studios under Tencent, and it was a shooter. Activision got the mobile franchise it actually wanted and the base builder was not going to be standing next to it in the store.

~ nothing to preserve ~

The Activision community thread asking whether the cancellation was real stayed open through November and December 2018, and somebody started a Change.org petition to bring the game back. Neither accomplished anything, which is the normal outcome, but the interesting part is that there was nothing for a stubborn person to rescue even in principle. No install disc, no offline build sitting in a cache, no private server somebody could reverse-engineer over a winter. A four-paragraph Wikipedia article and a handful of 2014 review pages are most of what is left of it.

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