While some argue that pirating decade-old games is a form of "digital preservation"—especially when official servers are shut down or plagued by security flaws—it remains a violation of copyright. Modern platforms like Battle.net and Xbox continue to sell and support the game, making the use of "part1.rar" files largely a relic of a time when official digital access was less convenient than it is today.

Are you getting a (like a missing .dll)? Are you trying to play multiplayer or just the campaign ?

Because file-hosting services often had upload limits (e.g., 500MB or 1GB), large games like Black Ops (which is ~7-12GB) had to be "split" into multiple RAR volumes. To play the game, a user would need to download every single part; if even one part was corrupted or deleted by a DMCA takedown, the entire set became useless.

The nomenclature of the file tells a specific story about how large games were distributed before high-speed fiber internet was universal: