What could have been: Call of Duty - Roman Wars

GamesRadar tells the story of Roman Wars, the lost Call of Duty game. Basically, Vicarious Visions pitched this game to Activision in 2008 as an ancient warfare game. Unfortunately, the game never went beyond prototype phase because Activision wasn't sure if it was going to resonate as strongly as everything else that was going on at the time.

It's pretty sad as this would have been a very refreshing idea for the Call of Duty series. The game would have followed a soldier in Julius Caesar’s Tenth Legion, an ancient version of the spec ops of today.

“I really thought an ancient warfare game would do well, re-skinned with the Call of Duty engine,” says Polemus. “Basically we were following Julius Caesar’s Tenth Legion – his special forces during those times - and we were doing a one level prototype based on the Battle of Alesia. So we built the one mission based on that. We had everything from riding horses, to riding an elephant, to working with catapults. All done in the Unreal Engine for rapid prototyping”.

The quality isn't that good but you can watch the four minutes long pitch below: