Full transcript of “June 4, 2026”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 The biggest solve for us at Infinity Ward is really trying to make things look authentic and believable, real. And if you get those things right in the real world, you can bring it into the game itself. Ever since I was a kid, we didn't have a whole lot of money um for toys and stuff like that. And so I made my toys sometimes. I would make toys out of plywood and stuff when I was getting older. I uh I was heavy into model
0:47 making cuz I loved Star Wars. And so I just grew up with a fascination of model making, kit bashing, and all this sort of stuff. And I do better when I have some physical thing in front of me to build from and I can look at it and twist it in the light and things like that. >> Hey now. >> Hey. Yeah, there he goes. We we build a lot of liveaction suits and and all these builds and stuff. Ghost is one of them. And this is the appliance that we'll use. It's a foam appliance. Um, easy to work with.
1:36 So, I'm just going to cut this mask down a little bit. Maybe my designer's philosophy is responding to things that happen along the way and then trying to figure out what tools do I have to solve those problems. But when we're doing stuff like this, it needs to be like visually consistent with with Modern Warfare. So, that means as real as you can make it. And I think that's really why it's important to not just draw this stuff, um, but build it for real. When you're working on an iconic character, you don't know it yet. When I did the original ghost concept, it was done in maybe under two hours. I want to say it was just three sketches. I had an idea
2:24 from design and I had no idea that this character would be, you know, an icon of the Modern Warfare franchise and like, you know, the face of a lot of this stuff. Sometimes I'll just start with a sketch and we'll go from there. These were some early looks for a ghost. A few of us felt strongly that we wanted to pay an homage to the original ghost. I think people that played those games back back at that time know and love and I think that's a look that might be new to players that are just starting to see ghost that way also. So there's there's something for everybody.
3:09 We had a lot of research with special forces starting back in World War II and they would they would customize their gear. So I see Ghost as kind of a an evolution of the craftsmanship that special forces people and even you know military in general they they modify their stuff for a purpose. They're doing the same stuff only the stakes are higher. I wanted to build them as a wearable live action suit. So, I've been getting some people that wear the suits. I have to kind of think about ergonomics. And because of that, it has those ergonomics built into it. That dictated the way the go the mask actually ended up looking because I built it physically. There's some stuff that actually makes sense. That's the best part about going from a
3:55 sketch to, you know, some type of concept like this to actually physically building it. What I'm really excited about with the Vault Edition is that this this version of Ghost becomes very special after the events of Modern Warfare 4. So that that really is why I think it was important to take so much time and effort to to realize this character and build this character out. his presence in this this part of DMZ really represents a next step into, you know, what I would consider like new places to go in Modern Warfare. Even their blueprints tie back to there's some meaning in it and context and how it fits into the world of DMZ. So, I am
4:41 really excited about that. I'm super excited to see what people think about this when we, you know, it's released. This is Ghost AK. It has an apex attachment and it has like a drone a drone killing attachment which I think is pretty dope. There's all these little cool Easter eggs in those blueprints that kind of inform they connect to the character or they connect to the region that they're going into with it. You know, a couple of those weapons are actually manufactured and come out of a really cool new place in TMZ that players will discover. The Volt Edition's kind of packed with some good goodies in there. I think people enjoy it.
5:28 I don't like when things look perfect. They feel digital and fabricated and unrealistic to me. So I this this mask is asymmetrical. I did my best when I sculpted it to make it symmetrical, but real things in the real world are they're as they're asymmetrical. They don't line up perfectly. It's very human.
6:23 This is Tom Sackles. He's an extraordinary character artist, concept artist. You want to talk about iconic characters? I think Tom is responsible for some of the, you know, some really iconic characters in the the Modern Warfare franchise. like this character like Joel just built the the mask. He gave me the mask. I took a photo of it, put together, put it on a body, passed it back to Joel. He worked on Yeah, we do a lot of collabors. So, there's a lot of back and forth collaboration that happens. But, yeah, sometimes it just starts with something that Joel just puts together and then we'll we'll make it into a full character. This process to me is it's an old technique and we're probably one of
7:09 the one of the only studios that does this. It's the DNA of how we develop here and it's you could see it's it's taken off. We've we've kind of grown the process has grown with the times and the technology and it's incredible. the fans and the community of Call of Duty decide what's iconic and we just do our best to put together really interesting artwork that is inspiring. >> Yeah. >> And he's got a couple on this project already. I've got the feeling they might be like the community might see it the same way, but I feel they're iconic already. They're really badass.
8:04 This this version of Ghost is actually really difficult to build and it's all bespoke. So, it's a one-of-a-kind build. you. There aren't any more of these in the world. This is it. And you know, down down to the all the scuffs and everything. They're all uh unique to this mask. So, this is it. This is the the source of this character right here. This is the Vault Edition ghost mask. I thought it'd be funny if there's this moment in the story where Ghost kind of comes out of the forest. He's kind of walking at you through the forest and he's he's got his head down or something and he walks up and he puts his hand on his face and pulls his mask off like and
8:52 all this gas comes out. You're like, "What is he going to show us?" Oh no, it's just another mask within a mask.
