David Vonderhaar, the multiplayer architect behind some of Call of Duty's most celebrated entries, is building something deliberately strange. In a Bloomberg interview, the veteran designer described his next project as "if David Lynch made shooters," signaling a sharp departure from the military formula that defined his career at Treyarch.
The game will be a cooperative experience where players tackle environmental obstacles while competing against each other. It is not designed to compete with Call of Duty. Instead, Vonderhaar is charting a distinctly different path forward.
Vonderhaar left Treyarch in 2023, a year before Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 shipped. His departure surprised the gaming community, given his fingerprints on landmark titles like Black Ops 2. Shortly after, he founded BulletFarm, his own studio, to pursue original work.
The studio's initial project faced a major setback. After two years of development, NetEase pulled funding from the game, forcing BulletFarm to scrap it. Vonderhaar acknowledged the lost time but remains undeterred. The company has now partnered with GreaterThan Group, a new holding firm founded by Simon Zhu, a former NetEase executive.
GreaterThan Group is also backing Star Wars: The Old Republic, another project that lost NetEase funding before being rescued by the holding company. Zhu created the firm specifically to continue work with talented teams whose projects had been orphaned.
BulletFarm's new game is being built from scratch. In a post on X, the studio said it was creating "a completely new first-person multiplayer/co-operative experience" centered on "high-intensity action, systemic gameplay, and cinematic immersion." The title remains undisclosed.
Ambition is scaling to match the creative vision. The team aims to launch within three years while keeping headcount under 50 people and avoiding bloated budgets. For a veteran like Vonderhaar, this represents a fundamental shift: more creative control, fewer corporate constraints, and no pressure to chase Call of Duty's formula.
Details are sparse, and they will likely remain so for a while. But in an industry saturated with derivative shooters, a Lynch-influenced experiment from one of multiplayer design's sharpest minds carries genuine intrigue. Whether players burned out on military shooters will embrace something genuinely different is the real question.
Author Emily Chen: "Vonderhaar has nothing left to prove in the military shooter space, so watching him chase something genuinely weird could either be brilliant or a commercial disaster, and honestly, that tension is what makes this worth following."
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