On Black Ops, Black Ops II, Black Ops III & Vanguard, after having your game open for roughly 25 days in real time, you will either black screen or freeze depending on the game you are playing. You can wait it out for another 25 days, but who wants to do that? Thankfully, there are ways around it.

Important Notes:

• You'll only want to use the bypass method for your game once the 25 day has kicked in, otherwise it may not work.
• Using the Quick Resume feature on newer Xbox consoles drastically slows the 25 day down.
• This does not exist on World at War at all.
• It is impossible to bypass on Vanguard.

Black Ops

This game will have a black screen after 25 days, in September 2025 this was discovered by community members, to be the black fade in that appears at the start of each game, re-appearing.

You have three options to bypass this:

1. Console Command
2. Config Bind
3. BIOS Clock (See the Black Ops II & III section)

Console Command

If you use a client that has the in-game console (such as Plutonium), you will need to open it, you can find a guide on how to do that here.

Once open, this is the command you'll want to put in:

/fade 0 0 0 0 0

This will remove the black screen for another 50 days.

Config Bind

This mainly applies to the Steam version of the game, as that does not have a console, meaning you will have to do this before starting a game at all.

Very similar to the console command method, you'll want to put a config bind in your "config.cfg" file, you can find this in your Black Ops game installation folder inside of the "players" folder:

1. Right click on Call of Duty: Black Ops in your Steam library.
2. Hover over Manage.
3. Click Browse local files.
4. Go to the players folder.
5. Open config.cfg.

Once in the config file, put this on a new line and change the key to your liking, then save:

bind K "fade 0 0 0 0 0"

Once the black screen takes affect, you will not be able to use this config bind unless you unpause, so be careful of where you pause at.

Black Ops II & Black Ops III - BIOS Clock

This method was found by Racroxx.

On Black Ops II & Black Ops III, your game will freeze. Do not be alarmed by this, your game is not over.

Before playing a game out, set up hibernation as that is required for this method to work, you can find a guide on how to do that here (scroll to the "Hibernate" section).

• Disable automatically set time in Windows settings.
• Hibernate your computer.
• Start the computer back up, but don't boot into Windows, boot into the BIOS:
  • There is a key on your keyboard that you'll want to press repeatedly until you are in the BIOS. This key varies by motherboard manufacturer but is typically one of the following: F1, F2, F10, DEL, or ESC.
• Change the month on the System Time to be exactly 1 month earlier.
• Save your changes and exit the BIOS. Once you boot back into Windows, your game should be unfrozen.