Ultimate COD Zombies Timeline (Community Cut)

How to Use This Timeline

Primer: The Three Pillars

Aether The original cosmic fabric, home to the MPD on the Moon, the Keepers, the Apothicons, and the cycle that tangles Ultimis and Primis crews. This pillar covers World at War through Black Ops 4’s Aether finale.

Dark Aether The mirror realm—corrosive, predatory, and full of entities that bleed into our world via power experiments and dimensional tears. This covers Black Ops Cold War, Vanguard’s occult prequel threads, and the outbreak operations that follow.

Chaos A separate myth arc (Black Ops 4: IX, Voyage, Dead of the Night, Ancient Evil). Not part of Aether/Dark Aether continuity, but we annotate it for completeness.

Prehistory & 115: The Spark Before the Fire

Long before soldiers boarded trams or cosmonauts stared into eclipses, a cosmic war split ancient beings into two paths: the Keepers (order, containment) and the Apothicons (decay, consumption). A transdimensional element—Element 115—acts like a skeleton key for matter, memory, and time. It powers wonders… and wakes the dead. Fragments of 115 crash across Earth in meteor strikes (Tunguska, Shi No Numa region, northern France), priming humanity for discoveries it isn’t ready to carry.

1918: Origins & the First Dig (Northern France)

In the mud of World War I, an excavation uncovers 115 beneath trenches and ruins. Giant mech footprints carve through fog as four young figures—Tank Dempsey, Nikolai Belinski, Takeo Masaki, and Edward Richtofen—stumble into a destiny that will echo forever. This period (iconically framed in Origins) plants the seeds for the “Primis” strand and for the idea that versions of our heroes exist across fractured realities.

The dig awakens a familiar pattern: scientists—funded, secretive, and increasingly reckless—pursue 115 to end a war quickly. The cost is a wound to reality itself.

1939–1945: Group 935, the Teleporters, and Samantha

1960s: Rockets, Ascension, and the Moon Swap

The Cold War supercharges occult science. Cosmodromes hum. In Ascension, a rocket stage coughs smoke beneath the night while space apes and chalk scrawls remind us that absurdity and terror sit side by side. The push culminates at Griffin Station on the Moon—home of the MPD.

Here, a pivotal sin occurs: Richtofen completes a long con to take Samantha’s seat in the MPD, swapping their essences in a ritual of bodies and electricity. Yes, the “soul swap.” The result is worse than anyone imagined: petty, brilliant, unstable Richtofen gains Aether control. Earth pays the bill. The rockets fall. Fire sweeps continents. The sky’s ash is a new weather.

Fractures: After the Fire — Victis, Alcatraz, and the Cycle

Post-Moon, the Earth is scarred. In the ruins, a new crew—Victis (Misty, Marlton, Russman, Stuhlinger)—stumbles into a metaphysical custody battle between two voices: Richtofen (now Aether’s petty tyrant) and Maxis (reduced to intelligence across machines). Radio towers, power grids, and rifts become tug-of-war points. Communities know these events by their playground names—TranZit, Die Rise, Buried—but beneath them is a branching logic puzzle about who gets the megaphone when the world ends.

Canon converges on Maxis “winning” that tug-of-war—tearing holes in the firmament and taking drastic measures to break Richtofen’s grip. But this simply exposes a bigger truth: there’s a cycle that keeps repeating. Another pocket tale—Mob of the Dead in Alcatraz—reveals how guilt, purgatory, and bargains with powers outside time can knot a story so tight you need a knife, not a key.

Primis Quest (Black Ops III): The Summoning Key, the Keepers, the Apothicons

Enter the “Primis” variants of our heroes—familiar faces, different fates. Guided by riddles, notes, and a cosmic egg called the Summoning Key, Primis hunts “souls” through worlds that look like stages constructed for one last performance: a noir city with rituals (Shadows of Evil), a reawakened facility (The Giant), a castle strapped with rockets (Der Eisendrache), an island lab drowning in ivy (Zetsubou no Shima), a dragon-scarred Stalingrad (Gorod Krovi).

Each step exposes the ancient war of Keepers and Apothicons. The Keepers’ angelic austerity is not kindness; the Apothicons’ corruption is a hunger that speaks in geometries. Reality is a fish-eye lens. When the curtain lifts in Revelations, a pastoral “House” hides behind chromatic storm clouds. Dr. Monty—a patron saint of breakfast cereal and metaphysics—talks like a sitcom dad while enforcing a cycle older than guilt.

“The cycle must be maintained.”

Primis delivers, only to learn they were props in a loop designed to keep a bad thing contained. The ending is a Möbius strip. The beginning is a promise. We go again.

Aether Finale (Black Ops 4): Breaking the Cycle

BO4 runs two tracks. One is the “Chaos” arc (we’ll sidebar it). The other is the Aether finale—Primis and Ultimis converging toward a last decision. Blood of the Dead returns to Alcatraz, reworking the Mob and trapping Primis in a purgatorial bureaucracy. Classified folds back into the Pentagon’s “Five,” sketching how Ultimis rode a carousel of paranoia and bravado.

Through Alpha Omega (a Nuketown-adjacent facility covering America’s 115 sins) and Tag der Toten (a re-cut of Call of the Dead in a frozen hell), the truth hardens: to end the loop, the heroes must end everything that empowers it. A decision is made. Blood shared on too many floors is shared once more, this time to shut doors, not open them. The Aether thread is sealed—worlds, corridors, familiar chalk lines—walled off so that nothing further leaks out. It is not a happy ending. It is an ending.

Sidebar: The Chaos Story (BO4)

IX, Voyage of Despair, Dead of the Night, and Ancient Evil walk a separate path: gods, artifacts, and secret orders. Different rules, different stakes. If you’re mapping the meta, you keep Chaos on a parallel shelf. If you’re binging content, you can watch it as a self-contained mythology break between Aether and Dark Aether chapters.

Dark Aether Era (Black Ops Cold War): Requiem vs. Omega

The shuttered Aether gives way to its shadow. Power experiments during the late Cold War loosen the seams between our world and the Dark Aether—a toxic reflection populated by entities that wear emotions like masks. Enter two organizations:

• Requiem: A multinational task force of scientists and operators sponsored from the shadows, led in the field by veterans with old scars and new gear.
• Omega Group: A rival bloc’s answer—a weaponization bureau with a taste for shortcuts and a habit of tying people to chairs next to humming machines.

The arc kicks off with Die Maschine—a Cold War facility built over a familiar ruin. Lights flicker through the ribs of Nacht der Untoten as if the map itself remembered us. Dr. Peck plays both cruel and useful. Firebase Z rips the fight to a jungle complex feeding an appetite it barely understands. Mauer der Toten drags Berlin’s bones into the present, and a former insider, Valentina, becomes a key to doors that should stay locked. The open-world experiments—Outbreak—turn entire regions into loot-and-lore boards where squads ferry essence, flip objectives, and lean into that delightful COD rhythm: clear, reload, wince, repeat.

The culmination—Forsaken—wins the headline fight but not the epilogue. The monster is contained in a way that says “for now.” The bill is paid in a way that says “not fully.” Powers are drained. Chains of custody shuffle. A director signs a memo that looks like a clean-up but reads like a chess move.

Vanguard’s Occult Prequel: Kortifex and the Deathless Choir

Wind the clock back to WWII again, but look through a different lens. Vanguard’s Zombies thread is a Dark Aether prequel told with relics and rituals. The names are the stuff of whispered campfire stories—Kortifex the Deathless and rivals who lash themselves to mortals out of spite, boredom, or strategy. An SS occult project and a desert map of altars pull operators into contracts with entities who help kill their own kind for reasons of their own. It’s a different tone—less corridors and more arenas of ritual—but the important thing is lineage: the Dark Aether’s politics didn’t start yesterday. They’ve been auditioning hosts for decades.

Outbreak Operations (Modern Warfare Zombies): The Deadbolt Era

Then the rifts open where everyday soldiers patrol. No more secret labs as the only stage—this is modern operations with contamination zones and objectives carved into familiar warzones. The community calls it many things, but at its core this is an outbreak era: quick-response teams dropping into vast playspaces, contracting objectives, and sealing tears before something big squeezes through.

Structurally, it works like a campaign told through seasons and Acts. You ferry essence, calibrate obelisks, close anomalies, and pull sigils from bosses that look like they ate a power plant. Familiar enemies return with new tricks—disciples who yank your health like rent is due, abominations that sprint, mimics that wear the room’s furniture as a costume. It’s COD at its most systemic: rotate contracts, track threat level, exfil with your skin intact.

More importantly for the timeline, the outbreak era cements the Dark Aether as ongoing, not just a Cold War relic. Corporations with private armies sniff at the power source; rival states draw circles on maps; scientists draw circles on whiteboards. Some heroes from earlier chapters show up older, changed, or in different roles. The arc says: this isn’t ending. We’re managing it.

Play Order: Release vs. Story

Glossary & Factions (Quick Grip)

• Element 115: The metaphysical accelerant. Powers devices, reanimates corpses, scrambles memory, pokes holes in time.
• MPD (Aether Pyramid): Moon device that grants control in the Aether to whomever occupies it—child, madman, or worse.
• Keepers / Apothicons: Warring ancients; order vs. hunger. Neither aligned with “humanity,” both decisive.
• Ultimis / Primis / Victis: Crews across fractures. Ultimis = the rough originals. Primis = mythic variants who attempt to correct. Victis = survivors running errands for gods and ghosts.
• Dr. Monty: A cosmic custodian with the manners of a breakfast pitchman; tries to freeze chaos by enforcing cycles.
• Requiem / Omega: Cold War rivals studying and abusing Dark Aether tears.
• Dark Aether: Reflection-realm full of predatory intelligences and corrupted biomes—more disease than place.
• Outbreak / Deadbolt: Modern operations doctrine for handling Dark Aether incursions at scale.

What the “Community Cut” Leaves and Keeps

Every Zombies season spawns a web of theories, ciphers, and subtle branches. A “community cut” accepts three rules:

1. Follow the loudest canon beats. When in doubt, track the throughline that later entries reinforce.
2. Honor pocket realities as thematic mirrors. Mob/Blood of the Dead matter even if they’re bracketed by bars of narrative purgatory.
3. Accept cost. The Aether finale isn’t clean because it isn’t supposed to be. Ending a cycle is messy by design.

Mechanics as Lore (Why This Mode Endures)

Zombies is famous for how mechanics carry story. Teleporters aren’t just fast travel; they’re narrative splicers. GobbleGums and Elixirs aren’t just loadout flavor; they’re diegetic excuses for cosmic exceptions. The Outbreak contracts in modern eras double as field reports. The craft table is a moral: we built this problem, we’ll kitbash our way through it.

And then there’s the secret sauce: hope in repetition. In round-based maps, you know another wave is coming; in the myth, you know another cycle might. The joy is in squeezing genius from inevitability—one more clutch revive, one more cipher cracked, one more ray-gun from a box that smells like ozone and old gum.

Where the Threads Point Now

The Aether is sealed—on purpose, with blood. The Dark Aether is managed—badly, expensively, and forever. That leaves three directions for the future:

• Institutional escalation: More agencies, more private contractors, more turf wars. Outbreaks become budgets and briefings.
• Personal returns: Survivors from older arcs reappear as handlers, skeptics, or saboteurs. They carry knowledge—and scars.
• Mythic bleed: The longer you hold the door shut, the more the door becomes a wall, the more the wall looks like a gate. That’s storytelling gravity. Sooner or later, something ancient calls in a favor you didn’t know you owed.

Starter Packs for New Players (Because Time is Real)

If you’re new and want to feel the shape of the saga without a dissertation, try these curated runs:

• The Aether Bones: Der Riese → Kino → Ascension → Moon → The Giant → Der Eisendrache → Revelations → Blood of the Dead → Tag der Toten.
• Dark Aether Essentials: Die Maschine → Firebase Z → Outbreak regions (play 3–4 tables) → Mauer der Toten → Forsaken → MW Zombies Acts in order.
• Chaos Sampler (separate lore): IX → Dead of the Night → Ancient Evil.

Closing Thoughts

Zombies has lasted this long because it respects two hungers: players want a loop that gets harder, and fans want a myth that gets weirder. The Aether years gave us a loop that was a prison; the Aether finale picked the lock at a cost; the Dark Aether years turned the prison into a fire escape we climb every few months with new gear and worse news. It works. It shouldn’t, but it does—because sprinting to turn on power with your team while the map wakes up is an emotion no other mode delivers the same way.

There are cleaner multiverses, tidier cosmologies. But none of them have a box that laughs at you, a dog that appears in blue flame, a staircase you run up holding a part that will definitely fix everything, and a friend screaming “train, train, train!” while you both pretend not to love the chaos as much as you do.

Swap the images and links for your site assets. Want this as a downloadable lore PDF for CraveZone members? We can package it with a minimalist timeline graphic and a printable map checklist.