Whether an interactive massacre is the right fit for an entertainment product is a question for the individual player. No Russian provoked heated exchanges in the press at release, some praising it as a statement about how desensitised we are to videogame violence, others accusing Alavi and Infinity Ward of including the scene to raise the game’s profile. He rejects both claims. “I mean honestly, Call of Duty didn’t need any more publicity.” Rather, as Alavi explained in 2012 to fellow designer and writer Matthew Burns, the aim was simply to build up the game’s villain in a memorable and player-driven fashion, rather than in the worn-out form of a cutscene.
No Russian was originally the brainchild of Steve Fukuda, but Alavi was behind almost every aspect of its creation, from scripting Makarov’s team to motion-capturing the animations used for dying civilians. “It took lots of iteration to get the first half of the level right. I was in and out of the mo-cap studio multiple times to re-shoot sequences, as well as redesigning and iterating on that first half over and over again. The massacre could easily have felt cheesy or gimmicky if it blended too quickly into the combat portion near the end.”