Call of Duty: Vietnam 'confirmed,' debunked

[UPDATE] Early Friday morning, Activision launched the site for the next Call of Duty game…titled Call of Duty: Black Ops. Information from UK retailer GAME confirmed the title will be set "in locations such as Cuba, Vietnam, and the Arctic." The original article is below. [/UPDATE]

For over a year, rumors have circulated that Treyarch's installment in the Call of Duty series would be set during the Cold War, or the Vietnam War specifically. Today, Silicon Valley blog VentureBeat claims that the game's title will indeed be Call of Duty: Vietnam when it is revealed on SpikeTV late Friday night/Saturday morning.

The reported confirmation caps speculation that began in October 2008, when senior producer Noah Heller said the best seller World at War would be the Call of Duty set during World War II. Then, last May, a That Videogame Blog article cited a "reliable" source as saying Activision was looking to license Vietnam War-era tunes, as well as Cuban, African, and Soviet music for "Call of Duty 7." Call of Duty 7 had long been the name for the project used internally at Activision.

Though the article was quickly pulled, rumors have persisted that either Treyarch's first-person shooter or Sledgehammer Games' third-person adventure title would be set during the Vietnam War, which US Armed Forces were involved in from 1961 until 1973. Some noncombat troops remained in the country until it fell to the North Vietnamese in January 1975.

Given the Vietnam War's ignominious ending and lingering trauma from the conflict, previous games that used it as a subject were not Call of Duty-level hits. A wave of Vietnam-set titles was released from 2003 to 2005, including Line of Sight: Vietnam, Vietcong, Conflict: Vietnam, and ShellShock: Nam '67. The best reviewed of these, Electronic Arts' 2004 effort Battlefield Vietnam, sold over 500,000 units on the PC in the US, according to the NPD Group.