Between hidden arcade machines and Ronald Reagan’s war crimes, Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War quite badly wants to evoke the 80s. But it doesn’t look like the 80s, so much as it looks like a high-budget videogame made in the late 2010s. Fortunately, you can fix that with an easter egg hidden in the newest iteration of Nuketown, with old-school colour filters hidden inside this year’s synth-coloured remix of Treyarch’s arena fixture.
As demonstrated by YouTuber MrDalekJD below, blasting the heads off every mannequin in town in under two minutes will grant you one of two colour filters – a green and black console look, or a neon-tinted vibe pulled straight outta Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
Okay, so they’re less “authentic 80s looks” than what’s we’ve culturally all agreed the decade should’ve looked like, but still. They’re a neat, strange twist on Call Of Duty’s usual Michael Bay aesthetic. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t count on getting it to happen in public games – the criteria to get the effect working is a little bit fiddly.
So, to get this to work, you need to shoot the heads off every mannequin in the map in under two minutes. The problem is, the placement of these plastic weirdos changes with each new round, making it impossible to route a perfect filter-enabling speedrun. The best bet seems to be to do what our pal above has done, roping in a few pals to take a region of the map each.
Once you do that, though, the game will randomly assign you either the green or violet look, alongside a synth-tastic new track from the game’s composers. Now, I’m usually the first to express exhaustion at this overdone 80s guff, but they do look pretty “rad” – flattening the colours down to paint the scene in glowing CRT outlines. I’m particularly fond of the harsh pink skybox in Vaporwave Mode. Yes, I know I’m misusing that term. No, I don’t care.
But, hey. Now you can add some neon flavouring to those gun-mounted Doritos – and if that’s not GOTY material, I don’t know what is.