'Call of Duty' beckons to anxious gamers

"Get down! There's somebody to the left! Medic!"

Those anguished cries and the sounds of gunfire rumbled through a Los Angeles soundstage recently, as the massive site was transformed into a virtual battlefield for thousands of fans relieving itchy trigger fingers during a preview of the highly anticipated video game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3."

The blockbuster game franchise saw its previous title, the seventh in the series, shatter release date records with 7 million copies sold in its first 24 hours in 2009.

With the newest installment of the first-person shooter game set to be released Nov. 8, nearly 6,000 fans descended from Sweden, Amsterdam and other spots around the world for the chance to be first to play the game during Labor Day weekend.

"I love this game," said Todd Betman, 21, of Fort Worth, Texas, as he got his face painted like one of the characters in the game. "And I wanted to see California anyway. I'm glad I came."

But most fans weren't seeing much of anything besides the hundreds of TV screens that lined the floor, as they battled in free-for-all matches or king of the hill games.

Among those were four guys from team OpTic Gaming, who beat 32 teams to win a $400,000 grand-prize tournament at the event.

It was mostly just fun and games for the team members, who live from Sacramento all the way to Cleveland and practice together online about five to six hours a day in the weeks leading up to major matches. They manage to balance it with school, although some test scores and homework assignments have fallen by the wayside.

"We hope to be the pioneers of something great someday," Johnson said. "We hope gaming can grow into something that can be looked at just like any other sport. Hopefully we can say, in 30, 40 years, that we were at the start of it, that we helped create it."

Real-life re-creations

For those who weren't glued to the screens, the game came to life in the form of paintball fields that re-created maps from the game. Others slid through the air on ziplines from a five-story tower.

Fans waited in two-hour lines to try their hand at shooting the most targets in a timed sprint across a dusty obstacle course or to battle in death matches.

"Once you're in there, everything takes over," said Steve Ramos, 30, a former Army Airborne soldier who has been deployed twice to Afghanistan and Iraq and was hired to add atmosphere to the scene.

Hundreds of fans were members of the armed forces. The game developer donated all proceeds to the Call of Duty Endowment, which helps veterans re-integrate into society. NBA stars including Kevin Garnett and Chris Bosh played online against troops stationed overseas.

For Tom Martin, 42, a sergeant stationed at Los Angeles Air Force Base, the game was a way to bond virtually with his brother, who lives in Texas.

"It's how we interact," said Martin, who was deployed to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. "We sit there and Facetime each other, and it's like we're sitting on the couch next to each other."

The two were exchanging trash talk as they waited in the slow-moving lines.