Black Ops 1 and 2 Are Back: Where to Get Them on the PlayStation Store

It actually happened. Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 landed on the PlayStation Store on July 9 as native PS4 and PS5 ports. Until now, playing either one on a PlayStation meant digging a PS3 out of a cupboard and hoping the old servers were having a good day. Now they are sitting on the store like any other game.

What these ports actually are

Ports, not remasters. Iron Galaxy handled the work, and the goal was to preserve the originals rather than rebuild them, so do not expect redone visuals or reworked gunplay. What you do get is the complete package for each game: the full campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies, running on modern dedicated servers instead of the creaking PS3 infrastructure.

That last part matters more than it sounds. These are fourteen-year-old games that people still argue about in group chats. Stable servers on current hardware is the whole pitch.

The Zombies part, because that is why you are here

Black Ops 1 is where Zombies stopped being a bonus mode and became the main event. Kino der Toten, Ascension, Moon, the original crew and the story that spiralled out from there. World at War planted the seed, but Black Ops 1 is the game that got the whole Zombies movement going.

Black Ops 2 then took it somewhere else entirely. TranZit was strange and divisive, Mob of the Dead is still one of the best maps Treyarch ever made, and Origins closed the era out in style. For a lot of players, Black Ops 2 Zombies is simply the peak, and it has never been playable on a modern PlayStation until this month.

Price, and where to buy them

Each game is $40 on its own. If you have PS Plus, both are half price at $20 each until August 6, which is the version of this deal worth taking. The Season Pass runs $30, or Each game is $40 on its own. If you have PS Plus, both are half price at $20 each until August 6, which is the version of this deal worth taking. The Season Pass runs $30, or $10 with Plus, and on Black Ops 2 it includes the map packs plus Nuketown Zombies.0 with Plus, and on Black Ops 2 it includes the map packs plus Nuketown Zombies.

You can grab Call of Duty: Black Ops here and Call of Duty: Black Ops II here on the PlayStation Store. Online multiplayer needs a PS Plus subscription, same as everything else on the platform.

One catch before your group buys in

There is no crossplay. The store page calls it a classic Call of Duty experience, which is a polite way of saying PlayStation players only get PlayStation lobbies. If half your group is on PC or Xbox, these ports will not bridge that gap, and nobody wants to find that out after four people have spent $20 each.

That exact situation, half the group on one platform and half on another, is what our crossplay checker exists for. And if the Black Ops nostalgia session falls through because of it, you can swipe through games your whole group can actually play instead. No account needed, and it takes about a minute to find the overlap.