To celebrate the charitable facial hair growing month of Movember and the recent release of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, we thought we’d pretend to be Call of Duty’s Captain Price and write an article about moustaches. This is it.

Hello. I’m imaginary SAS man Captain Price and I’ve got a moustache. Not just any moustache you muppet, this moustache is military-grade face bush developed by lab coats in an off-radar Governmental facility. Don’t ask.

But let’s stick to the primary objective, which is to look at some of gaming’s most notable moustaches. So let’s oscar mike out of here and recon some weapons of moustache destruction. Stay low and follow my lead. GO! GO! GO!

Is it the man or the moustache that wields the power to change history? I don’t pretend to have the answers, I’m just a bloody soldier doing my job, but on the battlefield a moustache like this stands for something. Perhaps it stands for liberty, stands for the very freedom we’re fighting for. Brave men will follow a moustache like this into whatever miserable hell-hole it leads them, because when it’s your life on the line brave men don’t follow politicians, they follow moustaches.

The reputation of the moustache is written by the victor. If he lives, and we die, Hitler’s moustache wins. Hitler’s moustache will be the hero. Because all you need to change the world is a river of blood and a moustache.

If there’s one thing I learnt from Captain Mac, it was never underestimate the moustache of your enemy. Anyone planning an assault on this particular draught excluder would do well to keep that in mind. At first glance fairly insignificant, but take your eye off the target for a second and next thing you know you’re face down in a ditch with no fingernails and soaked in petrol. And that’s not a nice place to be. Believe me.

What we have here is strong masculine bristle augmented with a primal desire to destroy men. In other words, this is the sort of moustache that could escape the most God-forsaken Gulag and snap the necks of every single guard along the way like it’s just another Tuesday afternoon stealing post-it notes at the office.

I’m only interested in moustaches I can rely on. Anything else is a bloody liability. And when the lives of good men are at stake there’s no room for liabilities. My survival instinct tells me this moustache is a bloody liability, the sort of muppet moustache that needs a map to find its way around a sodding flashbang. A wasp in a Juggernaut suit. Couldn’t breach and clear its way out of a wet paper bag. As much use in a fire fight as Imran Zakhaev at a snooker table. No thanks. Muppet.

Killed a man with a moustache like this once. He was an arms dealer operating out of an Estonian marketplace, his front was selling novelty Viking helmets to tourists while out the back he was shifting serious hardware to Middle Eastern fundamentalists. It took two kisses from my M82 to take him down – one for him and one for his moustache. You can say what you want about the Baltics, but when it comes to facial hair they don’t bloody mess about.

When he’s outgunned, outnumbered, and out of his mind, a soldier will look for something – anything – that makes sense. Because when you’ve spent six days off the grid, holed up in some cave in the ass-end of Afghanistan, eating lichen and drinking your own urine, things can get a bit muddled. A moustache like this can pull you back from the brink - a ‘tache like this can save your life.

What if one morning you wake up and the life you knew is gone – that the moustache you trusted unquestionably yesterday has been replaced by a moustache that wants to compromise your freedom? I’ve interrogated more bloody moustaches than you’ve had hot dinners, and I can tell you this moustache doesn’t believe in a minimum wage or public holidays or a winter fuel allowance for the elderly. Could you live with that, or would you fight for a better moustache? It’s your call, soldier.

I call this moustache the ‘Tango Whiskey’ or ‘The Worker’ because it’s the sort of moustache you can rely on to get the job done every bloody time. The words ‘mission failed return to base’ isn’t in its mocabulary. It’s a moustache that’s going nowhere until the intel’s been retrieved, the terrorists neutralised, and the nuclear warhead disarmed. Always the last moustache on the evac chopper.

Lovely upwards curl, probably achieved with some wax or a bit of soap... Soap. No. Bloody hell, Soap. I’m sorry. Soap... [sobs]

Well wasn’t that a lot of gaming moustaches. We know we left some well known moustaches out, but we did that deliberately so you’d be able to tell us about them in the comments. So please go ahead and do that.

If you want more things to look at and read, you could try 10 of the best Call of Duty moments in the history of the series, or perhaps the History of Call of Duty box art might be more to your refined tastes.