"No Russian" in Modern Warfare 2: the mission that shook gaming

Less than two weeks before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 went on sale, a grainy bootleg of one of its levels started circulating online. Activision confirmed the footage was genuine, and the “No Russian” mission became the most argued-over scene in shooter history before most players had inserted the disc. The game finally launched on 10 November 2009 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Here is what the mission really asks of you, how the studio fought over it, and what happened to it once it crossed borders.

What “No Russian” asks of the player

It is the fourth mission of the campaign. You control Joseph Allen, a soldier working undercover for the CIA inside an ultranationalist cell led by Vladimir Makarov, as Game Informer sums it up. To keep his cover, Allen follows the group into a Moscow airport, where the gunmen open fire on civilians at a checkpoint and then sweep through the terminal. The ESRB’s rating summary spells out the choice the game offers: you can shoot, including a wounded person crawling on the floor, or you can walk through and watch. Either way, the civilians scream and bleed.

Nothing forces your finger. The gunmen ignore a player who holds fire, but turning on them ends the mission. And anyone who would rather skip the whole thing can: a warning screen appears before the campaign, and Activision’s statement to the press said players could simply choose not to take part in that segment. Skipping costs neither progress nor achievements.

The mission closes on a twist (spoiler, open it if you don’t mind): Makarov turns on Allen at the end and reveals he knew who he was all along. The goal was for the Russian authorities to find an American among the attackers, so the massacre would look like an American act and push Russia toward war. That is also why the group is told to speak no Russian.

A studio split down the middle

Nobody at Infinity Ward agreed on it. Art lead Joel Emslie told Game Informer that “No Russian polarized this studio”: one camp wanted the player to be a security guard caught in the attack, the other liked the terrorist angle. Emslie had held back on the gore for the civilians, then changed course after showing the scene to his wife, a lawyer, who asked where the blood was.

Designer Mohammad Alavi, who built much of the mission, said in 2012 that the first version stopped the massacre right outside the elevator and cut straight to a firefight. He found that gimmicky, because the scene flirted with something raw and then flinched. He later told IGN, as GameSpot reported, that he first thought objecting colleagues were overreacting before concluding they were “100% right”.

The warning and the skip option came from Infinity Ward co-founder Jason West, who insisted on them even though Alavi first saw them as a way of dodging the point. West’s reasoning, as Alavi remembers it, was that players should be able to enjoy the rest of the game even if they disagree with this part. The same article describes a military veteran brought in by Activision to test the game: he saw that the people in front of him were civilians, put the controller down and left the room.

Ratings, a cut in Russia and a record launch

In the UK the BBFC gave the game an 18, and Wikipedia reports that the board tied that certificate to this mission specifically. Elsewhere the response went further. In Russia, Activision removed the scene from the PC release, explaining that the country has no formal ratings body and that it acted “after seeking the advice of local counsel”, with no pressure from the government. The console versions were never released there. Some outlets at the time reported an outright ban, which the publisher’s own statement contradicts.

The Japanese and German releases took a different route: according to The Cutting Room Floor, killing a civilian there fails the mission outright.

None of this dented sales. By its own internal estimates, Activision counted about 4.7 million copies and $310 million in North America and the UK during the first 24 hours, then around $550 million worldwide over five days, figures it presented as records for any entertainment launch.

Did a skip button settle anything?

Critics at the time were not convinced. Keith Stuart, writing in The Guardian, called the skip option a cop-out: the developers put the scene there, so it is part of the intended experience. Rock Paper Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen was harsher still and dismissed the level as “dumb shock”, according to Wikipedia’s account of the reception.

The mission kept casting a shadow over the genre. Wikipedia notes that Walt Williams, lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line, said his team wanted its own scene of confrontation with civilians to feel organic and to avoid the clumsiness of “No Russian”. Infinity Ward itself never walked away from it: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered brought the mission back in 2020, and the post-credits scene of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II in 2022 referenced it again.

That long afterlife says something about the 2009 original. Whether a choice to look away makes taking part acceptable, nobody has settled. Modern Warfare 2 tends to sit in a lot of libraries more than once: a scratched Xbox 360 disc, a PS3 copy, a Steam key, maybe the remaster. Radion brings Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo libraries into one list, so you can see which version you own and how far you got. It will not tell you whether to open that mission or skip it, and in the end that is the decision the game left to each player.