War Stories

Writer Jesse Stern discusses his work on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and how it relates to his day job on the TV show "NCIS" and the current writers' strike.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Like some TV and movie screenwriters these days, Jesse Stern -- a writer and co-producer on the CBS drama "NCIS" -- has been splitting his time between the picket line and playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Unlike his fellow scribes, though, Stern not only knows how the game ends, but as one of its co-writers (with the developers Infinity Ward), he knew long before the strike even started. But as he explained in a recent break between protesting and pumping people full of lead, writing for videogames and writing for TV is a lot more different than, say, a World War II first-person shooter and a modern-day one.

Crispy Gamer: How did you first come to the attention of Infinity Ward?

Jesse Stern: When I signed up with [the talent agency] CAA a few years ago, there was an agent there named Larry Shapiro who was very active in the videogame world, and the first thing he did was hand me a copy of Call of Duty 2. He said, "If you have any interest in doing videogames, let me know." And about a year later, after playing it, I told him, "Yeah, I'd be interested in doing a game, how does it work?" So he set up a meeting with Infinity Ward, and it was right when the guys were starting work on Call of Duty 4.

Crispy Gamer: Had you heard of Call of Duty before your agent gave you the second one?

Stern: I knew about it, but I hadn't played it. I used to be a really hardcore gamer but had to give it up when I got serious about writing for television because it was eating up all my time. I was still paying attention to it out of the corner of my eye, however, so I had heard about the first game.

Crispy Gamer: Did you come up with the game's original story, or did they have one in mind?

Stern: When I went in to meet with them, they had a kind of outline of the story they wanted to do, but said they were somewhat stuck because there were some discrepancies within the team about which way to go and how best to tell it. So I went home, read what they had, and sent them a two- or three-page treatment of what I would do. "I'd lose this part, I'd move this part later," stuff like that. But then I didn't hear from them at all. I actually thought it was kind of funny; I was thinking "Okay, I guess that didn't work." Five or six months later I got an offer from them: "Okay, we're ready for you now." It's funny, I've come to realize that's the way things work in the videogame world: You either hear from them a lot or not at all.

Crispy Gamer: How much of the script did you actually write? Did you write every bit of dialogue for the single- and multiplayer modes, or did you just write the main story?

Stern: It was actually a group effort. For example, a lot of the lines that people throw out in the background came from [Lead Designer] Steve Fukuda. We'd have screening sessions where they'd play the game the whole way through, and there'd be places that needed a little something, so people would just pitch lines. It was usually me, [Studio Head and CoD4 Project Lead] Jason West, [Lead Designer] Mackey MacCandlish, Steve Fukuda, [Lead Designer] Zied Rieke and [Lead Multiplayer Designer] Todd Alderman. Usually, when I'd go in, it would be, "This is what we're struggling with this week." Much of that came out in testing; they were testing this game constantly. It was a pretty unique challenge.