Be it Call of Duty, Halo, Counter-Strike, or any other of the countless first-person shooter franchises that have provided hours and hours of fun to millions, there can be few gamers who have not dreamt of running around one of their favorite maps from their most cherished video games in real life.
These maps often become as familiar to a gamer as his or her own backyard having explored every nook and cranny, every hiding place, every source of cover.
Though impressive virtual reality gaming and interactive experiences of all kinds have developed in incredible ways in recent years, there will never be anything as exhilarating as a competitive experience that calls upon all five senses.
Any hardcore Call of Duty fans in our state can rejoice because not one but two of the most popular maps from the most successful first-person shooter franchise ever have been recreated right here in Illinois.
The first of these, “Firing Range” can be found at Pekin Paintball Park near Peoria, Illinois.
The small-medium-sized multiplayer map has been a staple of the Call of Duty franchise since 2010 when it was featured in Call of Duty: Black Ops and then more recently remastered for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
Based on a United States island military base training course, the map features two main buildings, a small tower in the middle of the map, abandoned jeeps, and multiple distracting targets all of which have been recreated by Pekin Paintball Park to accurately replicate all the intricacies of the beloved Black Ops map.
Pekin Paintball Park’s Firing Range course, however, is not the first real-life recreation of a Call of Duty map made specifically for paintball other competitive team shooting sports.
It joins another map by the name of”Nuketown” that has long existed a little closer to Chicago in Santa’s Village Amusement Park in East Dundee.
Located under 40 minutes outside of downtown Chicago, Paintball Explosion has been offering Call of Duty fans a movie-quality paintball course representing the beloved 2010 Nuketown map for over a decade.
Based on the now-infamous 1950s American pop-up towns that were used as nuclear testing facilities, Call of Duty: Black Ops’s eerie Nuketown has been likewise replicated with incredible accuracy from its authentic school buses to its white picket fences.
The paintball course even features those creepy mannequins scattered throughout the Call of Duty map.
You can find out more about playing paintball and other games at these two centers by visiting pekinpaintballpark.com for the Firing Range map and pbbomb.com for the Nuketown map.