For South Koreans watching the destruction in Ukraine and the Middle East, the prospect of similar devastation reaching their own streets carries a particular dread. For those who survived the 1950–53 Korean War, it also carries memories.
Now a video game is giving that prospect a vivid and unsettling form.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, which Activision releases Oct. 23, puts players in the boots of a young South Korean marine after North Korean troops overrun Hajin, a fictional South Korean city. Early access to the campaign began Oct. 16, a week before the full release.
Among Korean players, the response has mixed enthusiasm for the game with unease at seeing familiar surroundings become a battlefield.
"Watching Korea get bombed and soldiers get swept away made me uncomfortable," wrote a Korean-language Steam reviewer using the name "문라바." The reviewer added that civilian massacres in earlier entries had barely registered.
Another reviewer, a former marine, said the game brought "a vague fear of war" to the surface amid North Korea’s provocations.
Hajin is fictional, but the tension it borrows from is not.
Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, said Thursday that propaganda loudspeakers aimed at the South would be ready "in a matter of days." State media had told border troops a day earlier to take "prompt and resolute action" if threatened.
The game draws on that atmosphere while inventing its own city and ruling family. Its plot includes a coup in which the supreme leader’s sister seizes power and has her brother executed.
Players have also been sharing a mission in which shooting a portrait of the Supreme Leader gets the player’s character beaten and executed by his own comrades.
The campaign trailer has drawn more than 97 million YouTube views since Sept. 17. To promote the release, Activision recreated a Korean back alley from the game, complete with a convenience store, in Los Angeles and London.
Under a Korean trailer, one YouTube user wrote that the situation looked "very similar to right before the Korean War."
"Imagine you watching football and see this in the commercial break," read the top comment on the same trailer, with about 1,200 likes.
For some players, the game’s emotional weight comes from family history as much as present-day tensions.
About 92 percent of 6,055 Steam user reviews were positive as of Oct. 22. The most-upvoted review, marked helpful by 866 users, came from a self-described South Korean military veteran using the name "Old Man."
"My grandfather fled south during the Korean War and was never able to see the family he left behind in the North ever again," he wrote. "I played this game thinking about him."
North Korea has appeared as a video-game antagonist before.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare opened in 2014 with U.S. Marines defending a near-future Seoul against North Korean troops. THQ’s 2011 shooter Homefront went further, imagining a Korea unified under the North occupying the western United States.
South Korea banned Homefront, while its Japanese release replaced references to North Korea with "a certain country to the north."
Modern Warfare 4 names North Korea outright. Its fictional characters and locations still leave Korean players confronting a recognizable fear: renewed war at home.
"Some may simply find it uncomfortable, but it can also serve as a wake-up call," said Lim Jae-cheon, a professor of unification, diplomacy and security studies at Korea University.
"It is history that actually happened, and it must never be repeated."
Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V revisited the world wars, while Rising Storm 2: Vietnam returned to the Vietnam War. In each, players enter a conflict whose outcome is already known.
Historical distance, however, does not settle questions about whose suffering becomes the setting for a game. The Iraq War shooter Six Days in Fallujah drew calls for a ban from a U.S. Muslim civil rights group, which branded it an "Arab murder simulator."
Other developers have approached war through the lives of civilians trying to survive it.
Kyiv-based Starni Games released Ukraine War Stories in 2022. Its visual novels follow civilians escaping Russian occupation in Hostomel, Bucha and Mariupol, drawing on eyewitness accounts. Among them is that of a team member who hid with his family in a Bucha basement.
Modern Warfare 4 depicts a war that has not happened. Yet it unfolds on a peninsula where the last one never formally ended: the 1950–53 Korean War stopped with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
For some Korean players, enjoying the campaign has only sharpened their aversion to its premise.
One reviewer gave the game 8 out of 10, but said finishing it had reinforced a conviction that extended beyond the screen.
"War must never happen on the Korean Peninsula. Never."
AJP Takeaways
- Activision releases Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 on Oct. 23, 2026. Its campaign centers on a fictional North Korean invasion of South Korea.
- The game arrives as inter-Korean tension rises. A Sept. 21 mine blast in the DMZ injured three South Korean soldiers, and Pyongyang said on Oct. 22 that border loudspeakers would be ready within days.
- About 92 percent of 6,055 Steam user reviews were positive as of Oct. 22, 2026. The campaign trailer passed 97 million YouTube views.
- Earlier Korea-themed shooters were handled more cautiously. THQ’s 2011 game Homefront was banned in South Korea, and Japan removed its North Korean references.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.