Former Call of Duty: Black Ops designer David Vondehaar is making some kind of shooter for GreaterThan Group – the holding company recently founded by a former NetEase executive, who are also funding development of Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. What manner of shootybooty might this be? Well, Vondehaar is making allusions to the work of David Lynch – the beautiful crackpot behind such films and shows as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway, whose impact on videogames extends from Silent Hill to Kentucky Route Zero, but who never, I think, developed a game himself.
Vondehaar left Call of Duty studio Treyarch in 2023, co-founding BulletFarm in 2024 with money from NetEase, but NetEase later pulled support in the course of wider corporate book-slashing. Now, BulletFarm have shacked up with Simon Zhu, former NetEase president of global investments and partnerships and the founder of GreaterThan Group.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Vonderhaar described the game as “definitely not” another military simulation and certainly, “not a Call of Duty killer”.
The context here is that GTG have about $40 million in the bank as of writing for their various videogame projects, with $60 million in commitments; today’s Call of Duty games have budgets in the hundreds of millions. The new BulletFarm shooter has a team of around 50; the most recent Black Ops game is the work of thousands. Perhaps predictably, Vondehaar is of the opinion that large teams and budgets don’t automatically make games better. “If you gave me $200 million, I wouldn’t spend it all,” he told the site. “Money doesn’t make it good. People make it good.”
As for the new game, he frames it as “if David Lynch made shooters”. Players will fight against both each other and the environment. BulletFarm hope to finish it in around three years.
Not much to go on, there. I guess if I had to put a senior Call of Duty developer in charge of anything “Lynchian”, it would be somebody who worked on Black Ops, a series characterised by hallucinations, splintered timelines and woozy period music. But mostly, all this news just makes me sad that David Lynch didn’t make a videogame.
As far as I know, he only ever contributed to one, abandoned videogame project: Woodcutters From Fiery Ships, “a beautiful kind of place to put yourself”, featuring pipe-smoking lumberjacks on a silver vessel from the 1930s. He also created an advert for PlayStation 2, which kind of reads like Lynch spoofing himself. In the man’s memory, I have popped his talking duck’s head on Black Ops guy, above.
