Unraveling the bizarre plot of Call of Duty's Zombies mode

For every zombie story somberly depicting the bleakness of humanity’s extinction, there’s a zombie story with a slide-whistle sound effect somewhere. The Zombies mode of Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops series offers the familiar format of surviving, evading, and slaying waves of the undead with increasingly powerful weapons, but the backstory—a spiraling canon of mad scientists, time travel, exploding monkeys, and a zombie George Romero, among other things—places it in a special 'zombie nonsense' category. With the release of the Zombies Chronicles DLC for Black Ops 3 last month, several remastered maps from the World at War, Black Ops, and Black Ops 2 Zombie modes offer a return descent into the timeline’s absurdity.

See for yourself in the below timeline charting what amounts to the 'original' Zombies story arc. Those quotes hang heavy, because as you’ll soon read, things get a little spaghettified. The information ga