In a decidedly unusual move, Treyarch—the studio behind the Call of Duty Black Ops series—shared on X that the first Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are “being ported” to PlayStation. These two fan-favorite entries are expected to land sometime in July, and they’ll include all three original modes: campaign, Zombies, and multiplayer.
Details about these re-releases had already been circulating, and listings even appeared on Korea’s rating site. That earlier documentation may help explain why the announcement itself felt so low-key. Treyarch’s posts on X didn’t mention pricing, whether the two games will be sold together as a bundle, or if any DLC additions are included. Still, it was stated that Iron Galaxy will handle the porting work. Iron Galaxy is mainly a contract studio, and it has previously produced a number of game ports and remasters—often delivering work praised for its quality.
We contacted Activision to get more clarity on what players should expect. The publisher confirmed that the Black Ops 1&2 re-releases will be on PS4 and PS5, stressing that they are ports rather than remasters.
This is a key distinction players should keep in mind before getting too excited. While Treyarch hasn’t yet provided official specifics, it’s possible to draw reasonable conclusions from what’s already known.
To start, the games won’t be remastered—and they’re planned for availability across two PlayStation generations—so they likely won’t be built natively for PS5. That means features like 120Hz support are probably off the table.
Re-releases are, in essence, limited to what the original versions could do on their original systems. Black Ops titles from that era are also known for linking certain gameplay behavior—such as physics—to the player’s frame rate, so any changes would demand extra adjustments.
The bigger and more pressing worry is whether the games will lean on their current server setup—meaning whether players can join active lobbies on PS3, where the original releases debuted. Anyone who remembers Call of Duty multiplayer on PS3 and Xbox 360 will tell you that many of those classic games have been plagued by hacked lobbies. Since these platforms no longer get security updates, players can add different codes to their copies, alter files, and effectively take control of parameters they wouldn’t normally be able to change in a standard match.
If the same server infrastructure is reused—rather than dedicated servers run by Activision—multiplayer could become close to unplayable as the hacked lobbies spread. For that reason, this arrangement also looks like a simple route for bringing the two older games to today’s PlayStation consoles. On Xbox, players can access them via backwards compatibility, while PlayStation doesn’t offer an equivalent built-in solution, which is why these ports are needed. This is similar to what Rockstar did with the Red Dead Redemption re-release on PS4 back in 2023.