David Vonderhaar, the design director who helped shape some of the most beloved entries in the Call of Duty: Black Ops series, is charting a radically different creative course with his next project. In a revealing interview with Bloomberg, the veteran developer described his upcoming first-person shooter with an unlikely pitch: “if David Lynch made shooters.” The game, being developed at his studio BulletFarm, promises a blend of competitive and cooperative play set against hostile, systemic environments — a far cry from the military combat that defined his career at Treyarch.
Vonderhaar departed Treyarch in 2023, a year before Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 shipped, and subsequently co-founded BulletFarm with backing from Chinese gaming giant NetEase. However, that initial partnership fell apart when NetEase pulled its funding as part of broader corporate cost-cutting measures, wiping out roughly two years of development work. The setback forced BulletFarm to start over, but Vonderhaar has found new life for the studio through a partnership with GreaterThan Group.
GreaterThan Group is a newly formed holding company led by Simon Zhu, a former NetEase executive who previously oversaw global investments and partnerships at the Chinese firm. The company currently has around $40 million in capital with an additional $60 million in commitments, and is also backing the development of Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, led by former BioWare director Casey Hudson. Both Hudson’s and Vonderhaar’s projects had originally been funded by NetEase before the company withdrew its support, and Zhu formed his own firm specifically to resurrect the work of these experienced developers.
While details on the new shooter remain sparse, Vonderhaar was emphatic that it will not be a military simulation and is “definitely not” intended as a Call of Duty competitor. The game will feature players battling both one another and environmental threats, with the studio emphasizing “high-intensity action, systemic gameplay, and cinematic immersion” in a post on X. The Lynch comparison suggests something tonally strange and atmospheric — a fitting ambition, perhaps, for someone whose Black Ops work already dabbled in hallucinations, fractured timelines, and psychological unease.
BulletFarm is pursuing the project with a lean team of fewer than 50 developers and aims to ship within three years. Vonderhaar pushed back against the notion that blockbuster budgets are necessary for quality, telling Bloomberg, “If you gave me $200 million, I wouldn’t spend it all. Money doesn’t make it good. People make it good.” It is a philosophy that stands in stark contrast to the modern Call of Duty production pipeline, which involves thousands of developers and budgets stretching into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The announcement arrives at a time when the shooter genre is crowded and players are increasingly skeptical of new entries. Whether Vonderhaar’s Lynchian vision can break through that fatigue remains to be seen, but his pedigree — including the widely celebrated Black Ops 2 — lends the project credibility. A proper reveal likely remains a long way off, but the unusual creative direction alone has already set BulletFarm’s untitled game apart from the pack.