Amazon ranks Call of Duty-est towns in America, large dining utensils in the lead

by Griffin McElroy on Nov 4th 2009 2:00AM

Grand Forks, North Dakota is a small city with a population just over 51,000 -- a large portion of which are students at the University of North Dakota -- that's tucked within a much larger rural portion of the state. It's not the first city to come to mind when you think of prestigious national honors in the technology sector. However, according to online retailer Amazon, which has been vigilantly tracking the geographic location of Modern Warfare 2 pre-orderers, it's currently the Call of Duty-est town in America.

Amazon will continue to rank American cities based on per capita Modern Warfare 2 pre-orders until the game is released, and has agreed to ship a $5,000 gift card to a charity of its choosing which serves the winning town. We hope Grand Forks manages to hold its top position in the rankings, if only because it desperately needs something to put on its city limits signs. You know, something more inspiring than "Welcome to Grand Forks: We've Got a Pretty Good College, Here, We Guess."

Source

Tags: activision, amazon, call-of-duty, call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2, fps, infinity-ward, Microsoft, modern-warfare-2, north-dakota, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (58)

Indeed.

...can you blame them though?

Looking at that list it would appear at first glance that it is cities that might not have a huge amount of easy to access gaming stores.

I don't know. I don't recognize very many, but the ones I do recognize are mid-sized cities with fairly large Universities. It seems college aged kids like to play video games. Who knew??

They usually do this before a game comes out. I remember about 2 weeks before MGS4 came out, and that's all you would see here. Don't worry it'll be gone before you know it.

Yeah yeah I'll probably go out and buy it but it seems like I'm already sick of this game. It's got to the point where if one of the developers catches a cold, someone will do a story about it. I know it will be a solid title but I've just read too many rubbish and over hyped stories about this game to stay excited. Leading up the release of U2 and now SC: Conviction, the hype got me all pumped but for this it is just overkill.

Ignore those "stories" and read the rest of joystiq.

GO URBANA. UofI FTW!!

I will give anyone who cancels their pre-order, back their dignity.

Sorry, Amazon bought that when they decided to give $20 credit towards my next game purchase.

Agreedo with Bubba.

I'd rather have an awesome game with limited server capabilities than a mediocre game with all the server capabilities in the world.

Someone should firebomb that shithole. Fuck IW and Activision.

I'll agree on the fuck Activision piece, but Infinity Ward are some of the best in the business.

I agree have you people played Xmen Wolverine Origin's try making it to the final stage Dead Pool I swear which idiot made the Square and the other mission Defeat the Sentinel harder then shit! Push for both objectives you have to push these buttons down fast.Circle and the Square button Dead Pool's a bitch to defeat his moves are so cheap!. Screw that damage your wrist.. Damn idiot douche bags who work for Activision..Also worried that there going to screw us over with modern Warfare 2..! Hey Robert Bowling without Dedicated Servers your going to have a lot of problems with cheaters and hackers!.....

I kind of agree, I am getting sick of misstep after misstep with this highly anticipated game: the terrible, arrogant marketing campaign culminating with the tasteless and offensive viral ad, the disabling of part chat, and killing civilians (I hope it is a tasteful, strong scene, but it just reeks of an attempt to top the first game's nuclear explosion.) CoD4 was far and away the best entertainment product I have ever experienced. I have never preordered a game before, but I was in a bind as I moved abroad and wanted to make sure it arrived in time when I visit the States for Thanksgiving. I even traded in CoD4 which had a good trade-in value to help pay for the preorder. Now I just wish someone would review it already so that I can see if I should cancel the preorder and buy back CoD4, as what I thought was a given improvement on an awesome game is starting to stress me out...

You can buy back COD4 if you want, but nobody is going to be playing the multiplayer within a month or so.

Hakuna matata.

Didn't they say that with WAW?

@b1gsl1ck

If you enjoyed CoD4, I see no reason why you would not enjoy this game. It's call of duty 4 with more stuff unless you play on the PC. If you do not want to kill civilians, then do not shoot them. The option is really yours. I do not typically shoot or hit ppl in GTA unless i need to.

@Fireaxe

The thing with CoD4 and W@W is that Call of duty players where fractured. You had the IW/modern warfare people who stuck with Call of duty 4 and then you had the people who just wanted to play the newest Call of Duty out there. Now we are combining those two huge groups back into one game so I would imagine that we really are going to see CoD4 and W@W fall off the top 10 n a matter of weeks.

I wish death on a different group of people every week. I used to do it through videos which I sent to Al Jazeera every few months but now I just do it on Joystiq for convenience sake.

Also, industry should change to the tune of what the consumers want, not what is convenient for dumbass bigwigs.

Dear god I hate this comment system.

You should firebomb it.

I think I'll get a couple of gullible fuckwits to fly planes into it.

I can probably find one or two of them making preorders of MW2 for PC.

if "flying planes into it" is going too far...

fire bombing, car bombing, suicide bombing, bunker bombing, and cluster bombing are all off limits too....

remember, we cause tons of people to deal with these every week.

agree with Spyder.

How about announcing who won the damn games from Joystiq, I have applied for the Transformers and all the other ones but never heard of any winner or anything that has to do with the contest. Hey, maybe its bull crap and they want more people to post?

the reason that city has more preorders is there is NOTHING TO DO THERE... im from minneapolis, so a fair number of my highschool friends went to NDSU and everyone that goes there transfers back to minnesota or wisconsin within a year or two because its the most boring school in the world. the only thing they can possibly look forward to is videogames.

Not far from UND....Still don't care for greedy people..

oh I always forget UND and NDSU are two different schools, now that I think about it, im pretty sure most people I know went to UND.

Your preconceived notions about the region are grossly oversimplified. I moved to GF and UND about 4 years ago from a little town called Denver, CO. Going from having the mountains a mere 5 minutes from my house to standing on a three story building and literally looking into Minnesota was a bit shocking. But there are things to do here, you just need to know were to look and make the best of it. I'm enrolled in our aerospace program and to say the least it's been a spectacular experience. I never imaged this amount of work to be so much fun and that is testimony to the staff at UND. We have a great hockey team (2nd in the country, and beat your lousy Gophers) that plays at the grandest, most finely detailed arena in hockey, the Ralph. In the winters we go ice fishing, snowmobiling, drinking, drift busting, flying, and play hockey. The summers, we tube, jet ski, water ski, fly, drink, fish..you see were I'm going. It's all very outdoor orientated and on those -30F days we like to stay in a and play some games, so what. I really do enjoy living here. So if you're uncreative and don't like the fresh air, you can stay in the cities.

i dont live in minneapolis, im from a suburb there but i go to school in duluth and have been here for over 4 years now and love it more then the cities (we call minneapolis/st. paul metro area "the cities"). i love the outdoors, and fish a lot on lake superior, i fly fish for trout and salmon and actually finally caught my first salmon while fly fishing a few weeks ago.

and the UMD bulldogs did pretty damn good in hockey last year, :) although im not a hockey fan. and dont take it personally, im sure there are tons of fun things to do especially if you love the outdoors, i was just going along with this article and poking fun at ND.

oh and when I sit on my toilet and take a crap, i am looking out at lake superior. :-D

I'm pretty sure the contests are legit, as I once won a copy of the PSP game 1943 strikers plus or whatever it's called.

There isn't a post about this, but I wanted to get it out to as many Playstation fans as possible. (At least I admit why I reply to the first post)

The God of War 3 Demo codes for Amazon Pre-order customers were sent out about 10 or 15 minutes ago. Apparently the entire world knows because it is taking a while to download. It is a 2.6 gb demo, so get started! Hopefully they post on this (i submitted a tip).

I preordered the next Joystiq post.

Say what? how you find that name Grand Forks?..I'm not far from that city..

DAMN STRAIGHT! Go UND! We the best.

apparently not the best at studying!

I disagree. It's a very good school, but I think NDSU is the best school ever.

I say every gaming website just change the tagline in the heading. If you really want attention:

"Joystiq - Modern Warfare 2 news, and other stuff..."

When I woke up this morning, I was not expecting to here news involving Grand Forks on Joystiq... Awesome. That's close enough to me that I feel as though I might just be able to finally sit at the COOL TABLE. Let us now commence a high-five/back-patting party! Crap... back to the loser table I go.. *cries*

Hmm... What's this table here? Cool table? Hmm... An empty chair. I think I'll just take a seat now.

*Burns into oblivion*

I live in Minot...do I count?

I'm from Grand Forks, and yes, we are in need of something interesting to put on our city limits sign. Anything... anything is better than nothing.

Hey you have a Super Target, thats usually enough for me to drive down the two hours for.

good o'l 2 litres of orange juice for 99 cents :)

I'm gonna say that Grand Forks has so many pre-orders because of the proximity to Winnipeg. And we know how much those eh holes like to come down to shop.

Surprise, surprise. A bunch of small, rural towns with fairly large colleges dominate this per capita list. The student population doubles the actual residential population for many of these towns, but the students aren't counted in the official population.

This is as surprising as that survey that ran yesterday saying teens and tweens want video games for Christmas. (Was that article pulled? I think it disappeared.)

#1 school for aviation though!

NDSU = meh. There is absolutely ZERO parties. I would know my gf goes to school there (plus its an hours away lol)

Do you really want your girlfriend going to university partys? have you ever been to one, its best any women you know not go...

A Super Target, a super WalMart, AND a depressing KMart! What more could you ask for?

A Super Nintendo.

Good thing a large majority is at a single university. They can yell down the dorm hallways in case this chat fiasco is true.

Smooth move Amazon. Nice to see another company doing something charitable. More should do this.

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Amazon ranks Call of Duty-est towns in America, large dining utensils in the lead

Reader Comments (58)

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