Black Ops: King of the video-game world

Looking to make a fortune overnight?

You can take your chances with Mega Millions.

Or you could develop a video game like Call of Duty: Black Ops.

On its first day of release in November, the new mack daddy of the gaming world earned more than $360 million in North America and Britain. The game, a first-person shooter, took in $650 million in its first five days. Both sales marks are records for any form of entertainment.

In comparison, the all-time opening-day record for a Hollywood film is $72.7 million for The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

Black Ops recently passed the $1 billion mark, the Holy Grail for the gaming industry. A handful of other games, such as Wii Fit and Rock Band, have earned $1 billion, but not nearly as quickly.

In the history of cinema, only seven films have exceeded that amount, most recently Avatar, which passed the $2.7 billion mark worldwide.

"Black Ops is the Avatar of games," says Michael Pachter, game-industry analyst for Wedbush Securities, via e-mail from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "The difference is it cost less to make, and we can expect a sequel every year."

The Call of Duty franchise (Black Ops is the seventh installment) is a juggernaut. The annual release creates a consumer frenzy.

"If all your friends are playing it and you're playing it, it has a snowball effect," says Geoff Keighley, host of the GameTrailers TV show on Spike. "Before you know it, everybody is playing it."

As gaming systems have grown more sophisticated, the online component, which allows you to team up with or compete against numerous other players, has grown more and more important.

The popularity of Call of Duty's multiplayer mode is a big reason for the game's dominance. It's the biggest casino in town.

"You might log on to other games and find a few dozen people," says Tae K. Kim, senior editor at GamePro magazine. "You can log on to Black Ops at any hour of the day or night and find thousands of people playing."

The game's publisher, Activision, boasts that the registered players of Black Ops by themselves would constitute the third-most-populous state, ahead of New York. According to the company, devotees have already spent more than 600 million hours engaged with the game. Or, to look at it another way, more than 68,000 years.

The Black Ops phenomenon is part of the rapid explosion of online gaming, across all platforms.

The addictive arcade game Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 50 million times, primarily as a smart-phone app.

Zynga, the publisher of virtual-world games such as FarmVille and FrontierVille, was recently valued at $5 billion. The company has more than 320 million registered users, most of them playing on social-networking sites such as like Facebook and MySpace.

Zynga's latest rollout, CityVille, notches more than five million visitors daily.

In the brave new digital age, popular games quickly go viral, gaining an almost frightening momentum.

For instance, at the moment nearly two million Black Ops-related videos are available on YouTube.

In part, this is because of an intriguing innovation added to the game by its developer, Treyarch Studios. In Theatre Mode, players can record scenes, creating their own highlight reels of firefights.

Call of Duty was introduced in 2003 as a first-person shooter game set in World War II. Black Ops moves the action to the Cold War era, with players carrying out covert CIA missions in hot spots such as Vietnam and Cuba.

Every detail was meticulously planned out. "We had approximately 200 people working full time for two years on this project," says Dave Anthony, who directed the game's development at Treyarch, in Santa Monica, Calif.

But moments of whimsy still found their way into the mix.

"We have this zombie mode, where you just keep getting attacked by zombies," says Anthony. "I wanted to do a zombie level in the Pentagon. I was talking to my creative director, and, totally kidding around, he said, 'We can have ex-presidents fighting the zombies.' "

Say hello to Richard Nixon, scourge of the undead.

Like many fans, Justin Brog, 15, a sophomore at Atlantic City High School, bought Black Ops the day it went on sale. He's a weekend warrior, playing with his schoolmates for about three hours on Saturdays and three on Sundays.

He gravitates to the Pentagon, his preferred first-person triggerman being John F. Kennedy (because he learned about Kennedy in school). "You have a lot of room to run around," he says. "Zombies keep coming through the doors. In each round, more and more zombies come after you, and they're harder to kill."

Presidential assassins are not as popular as battling Nazi zombies, a feature that has quickly gained cult status. Swastika-ed lurchers are not the only attraction in this setting.

"That game has dead dogs," Brog says. "German shepherds on fire, and you have to kill them."

Gamers can graduate through an astounding 700 levels of proficiency.

"Players want longevity," says GamePro's Kim. "They know they can pay $60 for Black Ops and be able to play it for hundreds and hundreds of hours."

Kim estimates that it takes eight hours to conquer the single-player mode. But after 50 hours, you're just getting your boots wet in multiplayer.

From the minute the latest version is released, players race one another to unlock the game's secrets.

"We spent a lot of time putting in hidden surprises," says Treyarch's Anthony. "We even hired a cryptographer to develop a complex number code that the characters use to send messages. We created a computer within the game that you have to learn to program.

"We buried this stuff so deeply, we thought if they did get it, it would take a long, long time. They discovered everything. And they had it all in three or four hours."

Now that's a rabid fan base.