David Vonderhaar spent nearly 20 years shaping the Black Ops sub-series at Treyarch, then quit in 2023 and spent a year building something completely different. That something now has a name, a backer, and a creative direction that nobody saw coming: a surreal shooter described as “if David Lynch made shooters.”
Vonderhaar confirmed the project to Bloomberg on May 12, alongside news that his studio BulletFarm had secured funding from GreaterThan Group (GTG) after previously losing backing from NetEase. The game is a PvPvE shooter where players cooperate against environmental threats and fight each other at the same time, though specific mechanics haven't been detailed beyond that framework.
What "Lynchian" actually means for a shooter
Here's the thing: invoking David Lynch isn't just a marketing move. Lynch, who died in 2025, built a career on films and TV that weaponized atmosphere, dread, and narrative ambiguity. Twin Peaks didn't just tell a story, it made you feel like the story was happening to you sideways. That's a very specific creative register, and Vonderhaar is deliberately planting his flag there.
Vonderhaar isn't even the first game developer to draw from Lynch's well. Remedy, the studio behind Alan Wake and Control, cited Lynch as a core influence across multiple projects. The internal codename for Alan Wake 2 was "Big Fish," a direct reference to Lynch's autobiography Catching the Big Fish. That lineage suggests there's real creative territory in Lynchian game design, not just vibes.
Vonderhaar himself has some history with surrealism. Treyarch's Black Ops games were never just military shooters. The Zombies mode built an entire multiverse mythology over more than a decade, and the mainline campaigns leaned into psychological disorientation in ways that set them apart from the rest of the Call of Duty catalog. He knows how to do weird. The question is how weird BulletFarm's game actually gets.
Small team, long timeline, clear philosophy
BulletFarm currently has fewer than 50 people working on the project. Vonderhaar told Bloomberg he hopes to ship in roughly three years and has no plans to significantly scale the team. His reasoning is direct: "Money doesn't make it good. People make it good."
That's a notable position for someone coming out of one of the biggest franchises in gaming history. Call of Duty development involves hundreds of developers across multiple studios operating on annual release cycles. BulletFarm is the opposite of that model.
Vonderhaar has been candid about why he left Treyarch. After departing, he reflected that the studio could "only do so much" with a franchise as large as Call of Duty, because its audience largely wants the same experience year after year. BulletFarm exists, in part, as the answer to that creative ceiling.
BulletFarm, founded in 2024
What this means for players watching from the sidelines
For anyone who followed Black Ops for its story rather than its multiplayer meta, this project is worth tracking. A PvPvE structure with surreal design direction and a director who built Zombies from the ground up is a specific combination that doesn't exist anywhere else in the shooter market right now.
Vonderhaar was explicit that this is "definitely not" a military simulation game, and equally clear it's not positioning itself as a Call of Duty competitor. That's actually freeing. The game doesn't need to win a market share battle. It just needs to be something players haven't played before.
With a three-year development window, expect the first real look at BulletFarm's shooter sometime around 2028. Check out our game reviews for coverage of the surreal shooter space in the meantime, and keep an eye on our gaming guides as more details emerge from BulletFarm's development.
