Call of Duty's Shipment map is an absurd, churning meat grinder that's been a staple of the series since the early Modern Warfare days. It's a polarising thing, too: PCG's Morgan Park has called it "The worst map in all of videogames," lamenting that "Spawnkills are constant, survival feels random, and a lack of cover gives dominant killstreaks free rein to murder every living thing on the map". Sounds like a laugh to me.
I've got some heartwrenching news for Morgan: Shipment, the bane of his Modern Warfare 2 sessions, is only there because the devs forgot to take it out before they released the first Modern Warfare in 2007.
In a chat with Dexerto, COD's multiplayer design director Geoff Smith revealed that the inclusion of Shipment in the original Modern Warfare was "truly an accident". It was originally cooked up as a purely split-screen map, designed to host two players using the same cramped, fuzzy CRT screen. Being tiny, easily navigable, and made mostly from shipping containers, it was well-suited to the mode.
But it eventually shuffled over to the broader multiplayer playlist when other devs started using it as a testing space. And then, oops, nobody thought to take it out before putting the game on store shelves.
"Our MP lead at the time, when we went live, forgot to [pull] it out and there was no going back". And so, Modern Warfare came with a bonus map, and 16 glorious years of chaos ensued, to the delight and dismay of countless players. All because someone didn't have a close look at those final playlists.
