The snow fell in thick, silent curtains over the ruined Russian village of Stalingrad. For a moment, Private First Class Alexei Volkov—known to his squad simply as "Wraith"—allowed himself to feel the cold. Then the timer hit zero, and the world became noise.

The last enemy saw him. A burst of automatic fire chewed the wagon wheel into splinters. Wraith’s screen turned red at the edges. He was bleeding. In CoD2, you didn’t regenerate. You bled until you bandaged, and bandaging took three seconds of absolute vulnerability.

“Push B!” someone screamed. “All of you, just die on the point!”

Crush and two others poured into the point. The progress bar crawled from red to white to blue. The announcer’s gravelly voice— “We have taken the objective!” —was the sweetest sound Wraith had ever heard.

On the other side of the map, his teammate, "Crush," was having a very different kind of war. A burly man with an MP40 he’d stolen off a corpse, Crush believed in the gospel of suppression. He hip-fired through a doorway, stitching a line of 9mm holes across a room where three enemy players were scrambling for the flag.

The enemy sniper, a Wehrmacht player who’d been camping the bell tower for three straight matches, crumpled. A clean, textbook headshot. No scope glint. No hesitation. Just the muscle memory of ten thousand hours.