Treyarch Lays Off Craig Houston, the Writer Who Built Call of Duty Zombies, After 20 Years

By CriticalPixel · 2026-11-15

Craig Houston is no longer at Treyarch. The studio's senior lead writer, the person most responsible for the shape of Call of Duty Zombies since World at War, confirmed in his own post on X that he was one of the people cut in the latest round of layoffs, ending roughly two decades in the building. No manifesto, no subtweet, no cryptic teaser about a new project. He attached his goodbye to a 30th anniversary video for the studio, thanked the fans, and said he was proud of the people he worked with.

Official Call of Duty Black Ops 7 screenshot from the game Steam store page

What makes this one land harder than the usual layoff notice is the credit list. Houston joined Treyarch as a video editor on Call of Duty 3 in 2006, then moved into writing and design across World at War and the first four Black Ops games. From Cold War through Vanguard, Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 he shows up in design and creative development credits, a rundown Eurogamer put together from the shipped games. He is not credited on this year's Modern Warfare 4, which tells you where his last stretch was pointed. The Black Ops side of the house, and the Zombies mode above all of it.

Zombies was his, from Der Riese to Liberty Falls

Zombies started as a bonus mode bolted onto World at War and turned into a second pillar of the biggest shooter franchise on the planet, and Houston was in the room for basically all of it. He came up alongside Jimmy Zielinski, Jason Blundell and Kevin Drew, the group that pushed the mode from a novelty survival wave into a serialized story with its own cast, its own lore, and an audience that argues about it the way other people argue about sports. That is not a small thing to walk away from, and it is not a small thing for a studio to lose.

There is a specific kind of writer who can make a wave based mode carry a narrative. Houston did it for over a decade, and the fanbase treats him as one of the authors of the thing they grew up on rather than a name in a credit scroll. You can argue about which map was the peak or whether the story got too clever for its own good. You cannot argue that he was incidental to it.

The layoffs are bigger than one writer

This did not happen in a vacuum. Treyarch sits inside Activision Blizzard, which sits inside Xbox, and Xbox has spent 2026 cutting through a restructuring that will remove 3,200 jobs, 1,600 of them up front and another 1,600 spread across the fiscal year ending in June 2027. Four studios were pushed out of the first party roster in that same announcement. A senior lead writer with 20 years of institutional memory is the kind of line item that gets trimmed when the spreadsheet says the business is not healthy.

What that means in practice is that Treyarch lost the person who knew why a given piece of Zombies lore was written the way it was, not just what it said. Studios rarely replace that. They hire someone competent, hand them a wiki, and hope the tone holds. Sometimes it does. Often it does not, and players feel it three maps later without being able to name what changed.

Second official Call of Duty Black Ops 7 screenshot from the game Steam store page

How the community took it

The reaction has been raw in the specific way only a niche fanbase can be raw. His farewell post pulled more than 8,000 likes and over 550 replies inside two days, which for a developer saying goodbye is a lot of noise. Replies range from outright anger at the studio to people posting clips of their favorite cinematics with a thank you attached. One of the most repeated sentiments is a version of the same question about what he did to deserve this. Nobody has an answer, because there usually is not one that has anything to do with the work.

Worth noting that the goodwill is not universal revisionism. Zombies fans are famously difficult, and Houston caught his share of criticism over the years for story directions and for how the mode monetized. That the response this week is mostly grief rather than score settling says something about how the community actually reads his run.

The CriticalPixel take

Losing a 20 year writer is a bad trade for a franchise that runs on continuity. Call of Duty is a machine that ships every year, and the parts that make it feel like more than a content treadmill are the ones built by people who stayed long enough to remember why. Zombies is the clearest example in the entire franchise. Cutting the person who wrote most of it to hit a headcount number is the kind of decision that looks fine on a quarterly slide and costs you a decade of texture.

Xbox keeps saying none of its announced projects are cancelled. Fine. The games will still ship, Black Ops 7 is still on Steam with its Zombies content intact, and the next entry will have a campaign and a mode with the right name on the box. What it will not have is the guy who knew where the bodies were buried, literally, in a mode about burying bodies. That is the part no roadmap accounts for.

What happens next

Nothing formal has been announced about where Houston lands, and he has not signaled whether he stays in games at all. Twenty years buys a person options. Whatever he does, the Zombies community will follow the name, which is more than most writers in this industry can say. Treyarch, meanwhile, has a mode to keep running and a fanbase that is now paying very close attention to who is left in the room.