Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Rickrolls Would-Be Dataminers

With Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War in cross-platform open beta now, it's inevitable that dataminers will be in the game's files, trying to find more juicy secrets and exploits before the game's release on November 13. It seems the dataminers have been anticipated by developer Treyarch, however, with a number of the game's files leading to rickrolls, as picked up by Dexerto.

A screenshot of the game's .exe file shows a number of bit.ly links disguising rickrolls--a link to the YouTube video of Rick Astley's 1987 classic Never Gonna Give You Up, for those of you who somehow don't know what a rickroll is.

Dataminers have led to a number of high-profile leaks related to the Call of Duty franchise this year, which is even trickier for the developers to dodge when dealing with cross-promotion in already-released games like COD's battle royale Warzone. This discovery shows someone is at least having fun trying to deter dataminers, with the links attached to popular configs like god mode or a season 1 test.

Treyarch isn't the only game studio rickrolling players in 2020, somehow. Earlier this year Epic Games rickrolled Fortnite players with a goldfish--and then sold the dance in the in-game shop for 500 V-bucks.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is coming out on November 13 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, as well as next-gen platforms PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. Check out everything you need to know about the game's different versions and cross-play here.