Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies (2010) and its ten First Rooms: why every run is played without Juggernog, solo Quick Revive, Mule Kick on Nacht and Shi No Numa, zombie health and the board cap, the maps and packs, the crews, perks, Wonder Weapons, points and songs.
Black Ops is the game that turned Zombies from a bonus mode into the reason a lot of people bought the box. It shipped with two maps, finished with ten, and gave the mode most of what it still runs on: four new perks, a Wonder Weapon per release, a Pack-a-Punch on every new map, and a solo Quick Revive that made playing alone a discipline of its own rather than a short night.
For this site it matters more than the others, because a Black Ops First Room is played without Juggernog. That single fact sets the ceiling on almost every record below.
cat 01-the-first-room-in-black-ops.log§ 1/9
The First Room in Black Ops
A First Room run keeps every door shut and every debris pile in place, and makes do with whatever the spawn area already holds. In Black Ops that comes down to four numbers and one machine.
Zombie health
150 at round 1, plus 100 every round through round 9, then 10% more every round. That is 1,683 at round 15, 7,030 at round 30 and 47,295 at round 50, against a bullet weapon doing somewhere between 50 and 200 a shot.
Twenty-four at once
No more than 24 zombies are ever on the map together, whatever the round total. Der Riese is the one exception, at 25.
Two hits
Without Juggernog a player has 100 health and goes down on the second hit; with it, 250 health and the fifth. The only starting room with a Juggernog machine is the German side of Verrückt, and it needs the power, which sits behind several doors. The one other way to drink it is in Area 51 on Moon, before the teleporter takes you to the room that counts.
Board income is capped
Repairing a barrier pays 10 points a plank, 60 for a full window, but the repair points of a round are capped at 40 in round 1, rising by 50 a round to a ceiling of 490. The room cannot be farmed for ever.
Quick Revive is the whole game in solo
500 points, no power needed, and it picks you up by itself, with the Mustang & Sally in your hands while you get back up. It can be bought three times, then the machine leaves the map. Four lives, and that is the run. In co-op it costs 1,500 and waits for the power, so it stays off.
Two maps have no power switch at all, Nacht der Untoten and Shi No Numa, and they are the only two where a perk machine other than Quick Revive works behind closed doors: both have Mule Kick in the starting room, at 4,000 points, since the September 2011 patch put a Mule Kick on every map. Elsewhere a second perk only comes from a Random Perk Bottle, the one George A. Romero leaves on Call of the Dead or the one a monkey carries for a split second on Shangri-La.
Speed matters less here than people expect. Zombies with a full human sprint only exist on Call of the Dead, where Romero’s roar sets off the ones around him, and on Moon, after a Gravity Lift or a long stay in No Man’s Land. The remastered Verrückt does not have the native sprinters of its World at War original. And in Black Ops alone, the last zombie of a round keeps its normal pace until something provokes it, instead of sprinting the moment the second-to-last one dies.
Two rooms are not really rooms. Call of the Dead was the first Zombies map with a single window in its spawn, but zombies climb out of the ground there too, and George A. Romero arrives at round 1 in a flash of lightning in the spawn water, with 250,000 health per player, immune to Insta-Kill and Nuke, and back two rounds after every time you beat him. Moon opens in Area 51, which has no rounds at all, only zombies that grow stronger with time; the Receiving Bay you teleport into has no wall weapon, and its two 750-point doors open together, so the room cannot be half-sealed.
One last twist worth knowing: the constraint this site is built on became an official Treyarch mode fifteen years later. Starting Room arrived in Black Ops 6 in July 2025, “locks all the doors confining you to the start area of the map”, and came back for good in Black Ops 7. Black Ops never had it. Here it was always something players imposed on themselves.
Every Black Ops map has its own leaderboard on ZFRR, and every one of them has a Hub wiki that walks through its starting room in detail.
Kino der Toten
The Lobby, two floors, four barriers, the Olympia and the M14, Quick Revive by the bar. Leaderboard · Map wiki
“Five”
The conference room of the Pentagon and its annex, six ways in, Quick Revive in the annex. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Nacht der Untoten
The ground-floor room of the bunker, five windows, the Kar98k, the M1 Carbine and Mule Kick, no Quick Revive. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Verrückt
Two First Rooms, the Juggernog side and the Quick Revive side, either side of a door that only the power opens. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Shi No Numa
The top floor of the main hut, four windows, the Arisaka, the Gewehr 43 and Mule Kick. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Der Riese
The courtyard around the mainframe, four barriers, no perk, Hellhounds from round 5 to 7. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Ascension
The centrifuge room, a lower floor and a balcony, Quick Revive, and a centrifuge that spins at random. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Call of the Dead
The frozen shore, one window, Quick Revive, and George. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Shangri-La
The courtyard in front of the temple, Quick Revive, and the Shrieker and Napalm zombies. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Moon
The Receiving Bay of Griffin Station, low gravity and the space suit for the whole game, Quick Revive and no wall weapon. Leaderboard · Map wiki
Next to the official boards, the Black Ops pages keep a few unofficial ones: Double Side and Reversed on Verrückt, and the 5and5 Mod, a mod that moves the starting room of each of the ten maps somewhere else. They carry no coefficient and score no ranking points.
cat 03-the-maps.log§ 3/9
The maps
Two at launch, eight across four map packs. The four World at War maps, Nacht der Untoten, Verrückt, Shi No Numa and Der Riese, shipped with the Hardened and Prestige editions, then went on sale to everyone else inside Rezurrection.
Area 51, then Griffin Station. Low gravity, oxygen to manage, the Wave Gun, and the Grand Scheme that ends the Black Ops story.
Dates are the first release on any platform, usually Xbox 360. None of the map packs ever reached the Wii. Alongside all this sat Dead Ops Arcade, a top-down twin-stick mode unlocked by typing DOA into the menu terminal, and the Nintendo DS version, which had four maps of its own and no perks, no Pack-a-Punch and no Wonder Weapons at all.
cat 04-the-crews.log§ 4/9
The crews
Eight of the ten maps are played as the four characters carried over from World at War: “Tank” Dempsey, Nikolai Belinski, Takeo Masaki and Edward Richtofen, known today as Ultimis. Primis, the crew people often confuse them with, only appears with Origins, in Black Ops II.
U
Ultimis
Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo and Richtofen. They replace the unnamed marines even in the Nacht der Untoten and Verrückt remasters, with lines recycled from other maps.
F
The “Five” crew
John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro, caught in a Pentagon outbreak. The first map in the series without the original four.
T
The Call of the Dead cast
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Englund, Michael Rooker and Danny Trejo, playing a film crew on a Siberian shoot, with George A. Romero as the boss. Ultimis turns up trapped in a dark room as a non-playable easter egg.
The three red telephones on Ascension ring for ten seconds every two to five minutes, and answering one puts Kennedy, Nixon or Castro on the line, with a line from “Five”. One of the three hangs in the centrifuge room, inside the First Room. The two maps are set at the same moment.
cat 05-perks.log§ 5/9
Perks
Black Ops brought four new Perk-a-Colas and kept the four from World at War. From Ascension on, a player can only buy four at a time; a Random Perk Bottle goes past that limit, and so does finishing the Moon easter egg.
Perk
Debut
Cost
Effect
PhD Flopper
Ascension
2,000
No explosion or fall damage, and diving from a height sets off a blast of your own.
Stamin-Up
Ascension
2,000
7% more movement speed, double sprint duration.
Deadshot Daiquiri
Call of the Dead
1,500 console 1,000 PC
35% less weapon spread, no sway when aiming, aim assist moved to the head. Cheaper on PC, which has no aim assist.
Mule Kick
Moon
4,000
A third weapon slot. Go down and the third gun is gone.
Juggernog
Verrückt (WaW)
2,500
Health from 100 to 250.
Quick Revive
Verrückt (WaW)
1,500 co-op 500 solo
Revives in half the time in co-op. In solo, a different perk entirely: see above.
Speed Cola
Verrückt (WaW)
3,000
Faster reloads. The board-repair animation speeds up too, not the repair itself.
Double Tap Root Beer
Verrückt (WaW)
2,000
33% more rate of fire. Absent from Nacht der Untoten and Ascension.
Mule Kick only reached the other nine maps by patch, September 27, 2011 on console and October 11 on PC, and it needs an online connection to show up anywhere but Moon.
cat 06-wonder-weapons.log§ 6/9
Wonder Weapons
Every new map brought one. The Pack-a-Punch, introduced on Der Riese, costs 5,000 points and stands on seven of the ten maps: Der Riese and the six new ones. The three oldest remasters, Nacht der Untoten, Verrückt and Shi No Numa, still have none.
Thundergun
Kino der Toten. A wall of air that clears a corridor.
Winter’s Howl
“Five”. Freezes what it hits, then shatters it.
Gersh Device
And Matryoshka Doll: Ascension. A black hole and a nest of grenades.
V-R11
And Scavenger: Call of the Dead. One turns a zombie back into a human, the other is a bolt-action that leaves a delayed blast.
31-79 JGb215
Shangri-La. The shrink ray: step on what is left.
Wave Gun
And QED: Moon. The Wave Gun splits into two Zap Guns; the QED does something different every time, and not always something you wanted.
cat 07-points.log§ 7/9
Points
The scale has not changed since World at War, and it still holds in Black Ops III. Worth knowing by heart if you are counting a First Room run.
Action
Points
Hit without killing
10
Kill: limb, or explosive
50
Kill: torso
60
Kill: neck
70
Kill: headshot
100
Kill: melee
130
Board repair
10 per plank, 60 per window
Reviving a teammate
5% of their points
Carpenter
200 to everyone standing
Nuke
400
cat 08-songs-and-secrets.log§ 8/9
Songs and secrets
Every map hides a song. Most want three objects found and used, a few ask for something stranger, and on Nacht der Untoten you play it with a gun from round 1 without leaving the room.
Map
Song
Trigger
Nacht der Untoten
Undone
Shoot three of the red barrels outside, all visible from the starting room
Verrückt
Lullaby for a Dead Man
Flush the leftmost toilet upstairs on the German side three times
Shi No Numa
The One
Use the telephone of the Comm Room until it dials 9-1-1
Der Riese
Beauty of Annihilation
Three green jars with spinal cords
Kino der Toten
115
Three meteor rocks
“Five”
Won’t Back Down
Three red telephones
Ascension
Abracadavre
Three teddy bears holding a sickle
Call of the Dead
Not Ready to Die
Three meteorites
Shangri-La
Pareidolia
Three meteorite pieces
Moon
Coming Home
Three teddy bears in space helmets
Moon
Nightmare
Earn the One Giant Leap achievement
cat 09-trivia.log§ 9/9
Trivia
Ascension was meant to be the launch map. It outgrew the schedule and was pushed into First Strike. Kino der Toten took its place, and Kino was itself a map held back from World at War, judged too close to the release of Modern Warfare 2.
Der Riese holds 25 zombies at once instead of 24. It is the only map in the series that does.
Verrückt got easier. Its native sprinters did not survive the move to Black Ops.
“Five” never reached the Wii, and neither did Dead Ops Arcade or any of the map packs.
Escalation reached PC first. It came out on PC on June 2, 2011, eight days before the PlayStation 3, on June 10.
Rankings
Tools
