In attempting to create the most realistic war game on the market, game developers at Infinity Ward started by surveying the world around them. They sought insights from soldiers who walked the front lines, then ranged beyond them. They constructed a battlefield by piecemeal, transporting our world into theirs. And, channeling it all through a powerful new framework, they brought their vision to life.

The bones of the game were laid with drones and cameras, phone calls and questions, requirements and innovations. Rather than a fanciful brainstorm followed by code and keystrokes, as many would assume of a video game’s creation process, the latest title in the ever-expanding “Call of Duty” pantheon formed around research and revelations, groundwork for a multi-million-dollar development process representative of the modern, multi-billion-dollar gaming industry.

If the bones of “Modern Warfare” were first set three years earlier, the action on the screen is the game’s body brought to life. It illustrates the tension of the game’s script with the tactics demonstrated by real-world soldiers, a blend the game’s creators hope brings a level of believability no “Call of Duty” game has reached before now.

The process of the creation is known as photogrammetry, a craft through which the Infinity Ward team captured high-resolution photos of an object from every angle, stitching them together to generate a three-dimensional digital replica they can then alter and manipulate using their software. The end result is a photo-realistic digital item far more lifelike than any computer-generated object.

Not only is the result more realistic, but the process is more efficient than the common practice of building a digital asset via computer generation. With photogrammetry, what used to take six weeks to create can now be scanned and refined in one, according to Infinity Ward Studio Art Director Joel Emslie. Over the past three years, everything from old tires to demolished cars to a tank have been scanned into "Modern Warfare".

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3