Call of Duty Godfather Vince Zampella, one of the minds who helped turn video games into a global battlefield of reflexes, prestige, and profit, died Sunday night in a car crash in California. He was 55.
NBC Los Angeles reported that Zampella was driving a 2026 Ferrari 296 GTS along Angeles Crest Highway on 21 December when the vehicle veered off the road while exiting a tunnel and slammed into a concrete barrier, turning ablaze immediately on impact. Zampella was pronounced dead at the scene while an unidentified passenger was ejected from the vehicle and later died at a nearby hospital.
It was an abrupt and violent end for a figure whose career reshaped how millions experience digital combat, and how the video game industry itself wages war.
Zampella was best known as a co-founder of Infinity Ward, the studio behind Call of Duty, a franchise that debuted in 2003 and went on to redefine the first-person shooter genre. With its cinematic pacing, multiplayer obsession, and annualized dominance, Call of Duty became less a game than a ritual, one repeated by generations of players across consoles, time zones, and wars both fictional and uncomfortably familiar.
Ironically, Zampella’s most consequential battles were not fought on-screen. After the runaway success of Modern Warfare 2, he and fellow Infinity Ward co-founder Jason West were fired by Activision, triggering a highly publicized lawsuit over wrongful termination. It was a rupture that exposed the fault lines between creative authorship and corporate control, an industry drama as scripted as anything in the games themselves.
Zampella and West regrouped in 2010, founding Respawn Entertainment. There, Zampella helped usher in Titanfall and later Apex Legends, titles that once again bent genre expectations and proved his instincts were not bound to a single franchise. Respawn was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2017, and Zampella eventually rose to oversee EA’s Battlefield franchise, an almost poetic turn, given his lifelong proximity to virtual warfare.
In a statement to NBC Los Angeles, EA called his death “an unimaginable loss,” praising Zampella as a visionary whose influence was “profound and far-reaching.” Infinity Ward echoed the sentiment, calling his legacy “immeasurable.”