Call of Duty Zombies YouTuber Glitching Queen posted a video in which she claimed to know the meaning behind a skull with a red left eye on the Black Ops III map Revelations. Since Revelation's release in late 2016, the skull in question was long looked at by the numerous hunters of Easter eggs in Call of Duty Zombies's community as part of some yet undiscovered Easter Egg.
According to Glitching Queen, the skull was never meant to be interacted with, and was simply a reference to the famous Terminator franchise this whole time. Her cited source is insider information from Treyarch, the developer behind the Black Ops series of Call of Duty games.
Call of Duty's Zombies mode has long been notable for its complex, multi-step Easter eggs, which over the gamemode's eleven year history, evolved into one its central staples. Developers Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer, and primarily Treyarch, traditionally leave a long, perplexing main Easter egg as a cryptic puzzle to solve in each new Zombies map they release, along with several smaller eggs. Since the main egg is usually the method of advancing the game's story and fighting bosses, intrepid players will spend hours tapping random fireplaces, watering flowers, and decoding actual ciphers, all real steps which have been featured in past maps. Prominent Zombies community members typically host Easter egg hunting livestreams for several hours upon the release of each new map.
Though the main Easter Egg to Revelations was solved in less than two weeks, a long time by the standards of the Zombies community, why there was a skull on the map with a barely visible red circle in its left eye socket remained unknown. It was long theorized that it somehow was part of an undiscovered Call of Duty easter egg.
According to Glitching Queen's source though, the red "eye," which is actually the top of a bottle, was just a reference to The Terminator and the series' titular robot's glowing, red eyes. The skull then, is representative of a terminator's metallic skeleton, with the singular red eye referencing the many times the franchise has shown a terminator with only half of its robotic face exposed.
Unfortunately, since the skull is an unmoving reference, that also means that players were never able to interact with the skull all these years. Nonetheless, the Zombies community will undoubtedly strive on, undaunted, looking for more obscure, hidden finds in their favorite gamemode.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is available now for PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.