Quote Originally Posted by Warsaw View Post
If I remember, there were reports of Activision being a bit squeamish about leaving WWII for modern day.
That's one way to put it

IW had to develop CoD4 in almost complete secrecy so that by the time they had to show off what they'd done the project would be too far along for the Activision execs to turn around. That's why World at War went back to WWII; Treyarch had already begun pre-production before they even knew what direction IW was going

Cruel irony becomes apparent when you notice that the game responsible for launching CoD's popularity into the stratosphere was the one where AV had the least involvement (except possibly the first maybe)