Warzone’s new map, Area 99, is ‘the birthplace of Nuketown’

Warzone’s new map coming alongside Black Ops 6 is a love letter to the sub-franchise’s most famous map. Welcome to Area 99.

The new map is “the birthplace of Nuketown,” because it’s a full facility where the Nuketowns of the world were built before being shipped off to the world to be the home of nuclear tests in deserts.

Area 99 is a Resurgence map that includes 10 points of interest: Reactor, Bunker, Test Site, Mannequin Assembly, Cooling Towers, Nuketown Shipping, Loading Bay, Warehouse, Manufacturing, and Pods—and it all features a bit of a retrofuturist theme.

The map looks to be similar in size to other Resurgence maps like Rebirth Island and Fortune’s Keep, with expectations that a new, large-scale battle royale map will come sometime in 2025 along with leaks pointing to the return of OG map Verdansk, too.

CoD content creators played an alpha version of the new map, including the new changes coming to Warzone later this year such as BO6’s omnimovement, at Call of Duty Next on Aug. 28, where the map was fully unveiled.

While the original Nuketown had a Vietnam-era aesthetic, it’s been iterated on multiple times in the past for future entries in the franchise, a zombified variant, a winter-themed Russian variant, and Nuketown ’84 in Black Ops Cold War. It’s about as famous as any other map in Call of Duty.

Area 99 is a fun take on adding some lore and background story to Nuketown by building off of it and making something new on the back of how fans feel about the game after playing and enjoying it for well over a decade.

Warzone’s Area 99 and Black Ops 6 integration will come to the battle royale game in BO6’s season one, which should begin sometime in early December.