Songfacts®:

• The American rock band Avenged Sevenfold penned this song specifically for Call of Duty: Black Ops. The tune can be found in Escalation, a downloadable map pack for the first-person shooter, which was released on May 3, 2011. It was the first time the video game developers Treyarch had commissioned an outside band to contribute a song since the franchise began in 2003.
• The song was written in four days by the band during their break between the Nightmare After Christmas tour and the Welcome to the Family tour.
• Frontman M. Shadows explained the background to the song in an interview with Revolver magazine: "The song is about the game. There's a full backstory to what [the makers of Call of Duty] been doing for years with their 'Zombies' series. I'm a big fan of the game, I play it all the time, so I got caught up in the story. They sent me over the full storyline, so I made sure it was going along the lines of the zombie story. So that's what it's about."