Grab some pizza and get ready for a potentially radical collaboration coming up in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s season two, which is set to begin next week.
According to data miner @PlayStationSize on X/Twitter, season two’s key art has been revealed to showcase an operator wielding what looks like two katanas (CoD officially confirmed season two’s art not much later). The art is awesome and the operator looks very cool, but that’s just half the story.
Another prolific and trusted leaker in the CoD community, @TheGhostOfHope, soon followed up by posting an image of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (that’s Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo from left to right, for the uncultured among us), which would make the dual katanas even more interesting. Leonardo, the blue mask-wearing leader of the group, famously wields the same weapons. But it doesn’t even end there, because another set of leaks in early December found references to several other melee weapons in BO6’s files. And that’s where the trail gets hotter than a fresh slice of pizza.
The files referenced these same katanas, along with a skateboard, sais, nunchaku, and bo staff. Yep, you guessed it. These weapons all also correspond to TMNT as well, as Michelangelo wields nun chucks, Donatello has a bo staff, and my personal favorite Raphael wields sais. And all of them are kickass skateboarders.
It doesn’t take a detective, or a reporter in a yellow jumpsuit, to figure out that this is all pointing to the turtles joining BO6 at some point in time. And given the timing of Hope’s post this morning, it sure seems like they will be season two’s collaboration.
Season one featured a collab with Squid Game, the Netflix show, and each season of CoD over the past few years has had appearances by characters from other IP. In MW3, those characters included Rick from The Walking Dead, Paul Atreides and more from Dune: Part II, and characters from The Boys.
Interestingly, though, the Turtles have already kind of made an appearance in CoD. Way back in March 2023, the TMNT‘s archenemy The Shredder joined Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0 as an operator skin. Now, he may just get his wish for some turtle soup a couple years later.
With TMNT all but confirmed, the only question left is how they will appear in the game. After all, they are giant humanoid turtles, so their aesthetic and art style will be something to keep an eye out for. Will CoD go for a stylized version of the turtles, or maybe something more lifelike, akin to the movies from the 1990s? As a 90s kid who grew up with those films (my first word as a baby was “turtle,” for real), I can only hope that they look similar to those silly costumes that can be seen in the video for Vanilla Ice’s classic turtle jam, “Ninja Rap.”
The official art from CoD also looks like it confirms the PPSh-41 SMG is returning, along with what may be the FN FAL assault rifle, but that’s just based off glancing at the imagery, and confirmation of what will be in season two is not far away.
With season two set to kick off on Jan. 28, we will know more about the potential collab and whatever else the season has in store on top of the new Zombies map, The Tomb, that has already been announced.
Published: Jan 21, 2025 12:44 pm