Vince Zampella, a video game developer who has co-created or helmed some of the most popular franchises in the world, died in a car crash on a Los Angeles highway at 12: 45 pm Pacific time on Sunday, December 21. He was 55 years old.
According to the California Highway Patrol, Zampella was in a car on Angeles Crest Highway when the vehicle veered off the road and crashed into a concrete barrier. No other vehicles were reported to be part of the crash.
A passenger was ejected from the vehicle, while the driver was trapped inside after the vehicle caught fire. The driver died at the scene, and the passenger died after being taken to the hospital. The report did not indicate whether Zampella was the passenger or the driver.
Angeles Crest Highway is a scenic road under the San Gabriel Mountains on the eastern end of LA and is commonly used for Sunday leisure drives. The vehicle involved in the crash was a 2026 Ferrari 296 GTS.
A storied career in game development
Early in his career, Zampella worked at SegaSoft and Panasonic, and he was the lead designer for the influential World War II shooter Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, which was released in 2002. But it was the famed studio Infinity Ward that turned him into a household name for gamers. He co-founded Infinity Ward with Jason West and Grant Collier in 2002.
You might think that since Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (which was released last Friday) is the 21st game in the franchise, it wouldn’t be that highly anticipated. You’d be wrong. Last week’s entry set multiple records when it launched.
Specifically, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the game set new records for Game Pass subscribers, particularly for a first-day game launch. That’s, of course, to be expected—Call of Duty was a major reason why Microsoft acquired Activision, the longtime publisher of the series.
It gets a little zanier, though. The Internet service provider Comcast says Black Ops 6 was directly responsible for 19 percent of its overall traffic the week of the launch, according to a report in The Verge.
That’s partly due to the game’s popularity, but it can also be attributed to its huge file size. A full install of Black Ops 6 can take up to just over 100GB, depending on your platform—and possibly as much as 300GB if you also install game modes tied to the previous entries in the series, like the immensely popular battle royale Warzone. That will wreak havoc on users’ data caps; Comcast imposes a 1.2TB monthly cap in many states.
Enlarge/ Who doesn’t want less recoil? Unless, that is, you’re someone competing against the person getting this benefit with a $100 “emulation” device.
Cronus
The Cronus Zen describes itself as a hardware tool for “universal controller compatibility,” letting you plug in a third-party controller, an Xbox controller into a PlayStation, or even your keyboard and mouse into a console. But you can also use its scripting engine to “amplify your game” and set up “GamePacks” to do things like reduce recoil animations in games like Call of Duty. And that is where Cronus seems to have gotten into trouble.
As first noted by the Call of Duty news channel CharlieIntel, the latest update to the PlayStation 5’s system (24.01-08.60.00) software blocks the Cronus from connecting. The update is “NOT mandatory,” Cronus claims in a notice on its website, so Zen players can hold off and keep playing. Still, there is “currently no timetable on a fix … it could be 24 (hours), 24 days, 24 months, we won’t know until we’ve dug into it.” There is, for now, a “Remote Play Workaround” for those already too far updated.
Ars attempted to reach Cronus for comment and reached out to Sony as well and will update this post with any new information.
The Cronus Zen, which costs $100 or more and is available on Amazon and at GameStop, among other outlets, does claim to offer accessibility and third-party compatibility options for players. But what has caught gamers’ attention, and Sony’s, is the wealth of GamePacks available for various games. Some single-player games, like Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk2077, are represented, but it’s the offerings for Call of Duty, Battlefield, Destiny 2, and other online multiplayer games that likely drew Sony’s ire.
Just a peek at the Apex Legends GamePack page suggests Zen mods “inspired by” the game, with options for “Aim Assist,” “Anti-Recoil Strength,” and “Fire Mods,” the latter of which can make you “harder to hit” and ping teammates when you are firing. Call of Duty: WarZone 3 mods include “Silent Aim. Insanely strong and not visible Aim Assist MOD!” The Zen was also capable of powering other cheat tools with emulated input, like AI-assisted aim assist.
Console manufacturers, already having more locked-down software than PCs, have taken up the cause of eliminating cheating at the hardware level. Microsoft issued a system-level ban on “unauthorized” accessories connecting to Xboxes in October. That had the unintended effect of cooling enthusiasm among fighting game enthusiasts and accessibility advocates. It did not, however, seem to block the Cronus, so long as you attached a compliant controller to it.
Individual game-makers have also attempted to block devices like the Cronus. Activision’s anti-cheat Ricochet tool called out “third-party hardware devices” that “act as a passthrough for controllers” in a blog post about its April 2023 updates. The same went for Ubisoft and Bungie, none of which called out the Cronus Zen in particular, but were signaling efforts to block it and similar devices, like the XIM and ReaSnow S1. Fortnite was ahead of the game, calling out the Cronus Zen and Cronus Max in late 2022.
None of these companies have offered a patch to the behavior of people who want to spend more than $100 and risk lifetime bans to earn undeserved points worth no tradable value.
