Last week, Activision confirmed that Treyarch and Raven are working on the next Call of Duty game. With this news, it seems that the road to the actual release of the game has begun.

The process began with a crate containing a projector and slides of maps of the US and Russia being mailed to influencers; if you have five hours, you can watch the whole thing courtesy of YouTuber NoahJ456. But the brief version put together by VCG is that the intrepid sleuths eventually arrived at the 1972 World Chess Championship, Boris Spassky vs. Bobby Fischer. After tracking the game's movements during that tournament, a website called pawntakespawn.com was discovered.

The site is currently not very active, but currently contains some very interesting images. A CRT TV, a VCR, a telephone handset plugged into an acoustic coupler, and an old IBM PC sitting in the background. Everything is "early 1980s" and ties in well with the game's presumed title, "Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War," as does the Spassky vs. Fischer fight mentioned in the ARG. In an interview with Bill Kristol, former world champion Garry Kasparov said that Fischer's decisive defeat of then-champion Spassky (the first time an American-born American player had become champion) was "a shocking moment in the midst of the Cold War"

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Often overlooked, the site also indicates that something will happen - my guess is an official announcement - later this week: the VTR will flash 12:00, as most VTRs do, but wait long enough and it will reverse for a moment, flashing "08-14" instead. That is August 14, or this Friday.

Taken together, this year's Call of Duty will take us back to the Cold War era. As the week goes on, we'll have more information on what's coming up, and we'll let you know.