former Call of Duty designer reboots BulletFarm with surreal shooter

David Vonderhaar is trying to turn the lessons of Call of Duty multiplayer into something stranger, smaller, and more personal. At BulletFarm, the former Treyarch multiplayer director is building an original first-person multiplayer and co-op shooter that he says is closer to a surreal, Lynchian game than a conventional military FPS.

That matters because Vonderhaar was one of the key architects behind Black Ops’ feel. He left Treyarch in 2023 after 18 years and work on eight Call of Duty games, and his reputation in the community was built on balancing, pacing, and the competitive snap that helped define Black Ops multiplayer. BulletFarm now looks like a place where those instincts can be pushed into a new lane, with cinematic immersion and systemic gameplay doing the work that annualized military sequel rules usually handle.

The studio’s reboot also gives the project a cleaner runway. BulletFarm was first announced by NetEase Games on February 28, 2024 as a remote-first AAA studio headquartered in Los Angeles, California, working in Unreal Engine 5 on an original-universe game with co-operative play at the center. IGN reported that the earlier version of the project was effectively scrapped after about two years of work, but the studio is treating the restart as a fresh beginning rather than a dead end. Fewer than 50 developers are working on the new title, a scale that suggests tighter ambition instead of the bloated production that has swallowed so many shooters.

The new backing comes from GreaterThanGroup, announced on May 12, 2026 by former NetEase executive Simon Zhu. Business Wire said the holding company had $40 million in the bank and another $60 million in funding commitments, with BulletFarm joining Arcanaut Studios and MAGship as one of the first studios under the umbrella. GreaterThanGroup says it is meant to “build, empower and fund” elite creative teams, and the timing fits a year defined by layoffs and project cancellations across the industry.

For Call of Duty fans, the interesting part is not that Vonderhaar left behind military spectacle. It is that he may be carrying Black Ops’ design discipline into a game that refuses to look or sound like Call of Duty. If BulletFarm can pair tight moment-to-moment shooting with the weirdness of a surreal, original universe, it could show how far arcade military FPS DNA can stretch before it stops feeling like the genre’s old center of gravity.