The man who shepherded every Black Ops game ever made has called it after 22 years at Treyarch.
Mark Gordon arrived at the studio in 2005 as Chief Technology Officer, at a point when Treyarch was still hedging its bets between Spider-Man tie-ins and the Call of Duty franchise it would go on to define.
He climbed from CTO to VP of Development to Studio Head, and the entire Black Ops era happened on his watch. That is a lot of history for one person to carry out the door.
Treyarch names two co-studio heads as Mark Gordon retires
Treyarch confirmed Gordon’s retirement on June 15 alongside the news that Kevin Hendrickson and Yale Miller would share the Studio Head role going forward.
Hendrickson, who had been Treyarch’s Chief Operating Officer since 2022, spent the eight years before that as VP and Head of Production for the entire Call of Duty franchise at Activision.
Miller joined Treyarch in 2017 as a Senior Producer and has been Director of Production there since 2020. Between them, the studio is arguing, you get the equivalent of one Mark Gordon.
In its announcement, Treyarch credited Gordon with shepherding the franchise from Call of Duty 2: Big Red One through the entirety of the Black Ops series, which is, when you lay it out like that, an almost unreasonable amount of work for one person to have oversight of.
He is not the first long-timer to exit, as design director David Vonderhaar left after 18 years in 2023, and co-studio head Dan Bunting departed in 2021.
For now, Black Ops 7 is in Season 4 and very much in players’ hands, which means Hendrickson and Miller do not get a quiet onboarding period. They inherit a live game, a fanbase with opinions, and a legacy that took 22 years to accumulate.
For everything about what they’re now responsible for, here is a full breakdown of Black Ops 7 and a look at every Call of Duty game Gordon’s career touched, in order.
