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Captain Price seems to die in a cut ending from Modern Warfare 3, uncovered 13 years laterPrice cut

Price cut

Image credit:Activision

Image credit:Activision

A soldier runs across a battlefield in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)

You remember the ending of 2011’s first-person bullethoserCall of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, right? Everyone does! A big man kills another big man with a gun but then - then! - a third big man kills that first big man with a rope. It’s dramatic stuff. Well, a data-diving enthusiast of the CoDwars has discovered a cut ending from the original trilogy’s closing chapter. It’s a more downbeat and mysterious finale, featuring a shadowy figure whose identity is never revealed. Also, Captain Price, the hero of the franchise and aforementioned big man number three, drops his cigar with possibly mortal implications.

MW3 Cut Post-Credits Scene (4K)Watch on YouTube

MW3 Cut Post-Credits Scene (4K)

Cover image for YouTube video

Anyway, compare all this tothe original endingin which Captain Price painfully but satisfyingly lights his cigar and chills out, watching a corpse swing in front of him (normal Captain Price pastime).

I’m poking fun. But I do find it interesting to see relics of gaming yesteryear surfacing and spawning conspiracy theories among fans, even as late as 13 years from the game’s release. Lots of stuff ends up on the chopping room floor in video game development. It’s hard to know why things get cut without having been in the studio when the decision was made. We could speculate this was a planned teaser for a follow-up Call of Duty game, but that the mysterious ending was canned for whatever reason. (Infinity Ward’s next CoD ended up beingCall of Duty: Ghosts, which told its own separate story, independent of previous characters). But only the team involved will likely know what was intended here. For now, I’ll leave the Call of Dutiful out there to come to their own conclusions.

Again, this is the Modern Warfare of many years ago, not thefirst-person shooterremake of 2023. It was an awkward time for the series back then, developed amid the fallout of departing team members who would go on to form Respawn Entertainment. John (RPS in peace) didn’t like the shooter much in hisModern Warfare 3 review, calling it a “bombastic and clumsy un-game”. But if you want to see how it stacks up next to the others in the series, we did once haveall the Call of Duty games ranked.