Activision seems to have gotten ahead of themselves, revealing the official Call of Duty Black Ops 6 logo.
And yes, it looks like the name is Call of Duty Black Ops 6, with no subheading or additional title referring to the Gulf War. It’s also interesting that they went with the Arabic number 6 instead of the Roman number VI.
As shared on the GamingLeaksandRumors subreddit by scott1swann, the logo was published in USA Today. The game’s official name is depicted, with the emblem of three dog heads coming out of a shield, seemingly evoking the mythological Cerberus, just below that name.
This doesn’t look like a leak in the conventional way that we know them. Instead, Activision’s advertising seems to have come ahead of the official reveal.
Microsoft revealed that this year’s Xbox Games Showcase, which will be coming this June, will have an additional event afterwards. While they heavily hinted that it would be for the next Call of Duty, they didn’t actually officially confirm it.
Subsequently, in the following days we have been seeing Activision launch their stealth campaign for the next Call of Duty, with an ARG in active operation. They started by launching a website this Tuesday, and then posting videos on the site for the following day.
Is this logo reveal a leak, an accident, or somehow part of the ARG? Microsoft created the impression that they would hide as much about this game as possible until the Xbox Games Showcase, but maybe they were intentionally throwing us off.
But then, we don’t really know, of course. It’s possible that they bought these ads at a much earlier time, and they ended up getting published too early. That may be an oversight with the broadsheet publisher, but it’s also possible that Microsoft and Activision made early plans on marketing this game and plans changed.
In any case, this isn’t the same thing as a dataminer or a relative of someone working in Treyarch sharing something they knew Activision didn’t want people to see yet. As some fans posit, it’s actually pretty common for Call of Duty logos to leak early, because Activision lines up a lot of promotion in the mainstream. Hilariously, there’s so many times when Activision fails to keep their promotion partners in the loop, and that’s how these things happen.
A logo is hardly a game reveal, of course, and we still don’t know anything for sure about this game. We don’t even know yet if the rumors that it’s set around the Gulf War is accurate. But fans really just need to wait for everything to be revealed.