I haven’t been to D.C. since I was five. I plan to go this year or the next, but I don’t remember it at all.
I play Fallout 3 a lot, love the game, and love wandering around the Mall and D.C. Metro. I tried looking on Google Maps to see how accurate it is, and I got some idea that it’s not bad, but honestly, you couldn’t tell unless you were actually there.
So I figured I’d ask here. As a comparison, mostly when NYC is depicted in movies, things are changed around. Major landscapes are moved right next to each other or much closer than they are normally, so we can easily walk/drive/run to the next one. I was wondering if something similar was done in Fallout 3.
Any similarities/differences mentioned will be appreciated. Thanks!
One of the nice things about a city planned and designed from the ground up, is that all the important stuff is built so you can easily walk between them.
The names of many of the Metro stations are wrong, or at least, not the same as actual Metro station names, the fake Metro goes to a lot of places the real Metro doesn’t (like Georgetown) and there’s no White Line on the real metro, just Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, and Orange lines.
Not sure how different everything is, but I know the justification is that A) It’s an alternate universe and B) The ground actually shifted during the bombing.
The lines in the game are simplified. They just have two lines, red and white, that cross each other. The real metro is more complicatedthan that.
The monuments and museums are all in the correct locations.
The Metro stations in the games are bigger than the ones in real life, but a lot of it is accurate. The tileis identical to real life, as is the lighting, benches and signage. The trains are correct, though you’d think they’d have updated the design in the interceding 400 years, no? There aren’t vending machines in the real world, nor are there bathrooms.
Arefu is on the Key Bridge or perhaps further upriver. It seems too far from downtown in the game to me. Megaton is, I think, is actually Ballston or Fall’s Church. Fall’s Church and Bailey’s Crossroads are real places in northern VA. Rivet City is actually Navy Yard.
It’s worth noting, too, that the game was made by BethesdaGames. That’s all the interesting things I can think of for now. What else did you want to know.
I’m aware of one bathroom open to the public, it’s tucked away behind a maintenance door in Pentagon City. The Shirlington Transit Center also has public facilities but that’s a bus depot.
Huh, I thought I remembered taking the Metro to Georgetown, last time I was there (admittedly, well over a decade). Maybe we just took it to the closest stop and walked the rest of the way? I’m almost certain that we left our car parked at Balston, and rode or walked everywhere else we went.
I swear I’d gotten an exact date for the timeline split for the Fallout universe, more specific than just “the 1950s,” but really, that’s exact enough to understand the different metro stops. The real DC metro began construction in December 1969, after the split. Aside from a few common-sense metro stops like Dupont or the Mall that would be consistent across any universe (and do appear as reasonably realistic analogs in the game), everything else can be imagined to be in flux based on what communities can make a fair claim for why they should be mapped into the metro system. So Bethesda’s designers could pay homage where they wanted, slot in new stations where it makes sense for the game, and simplify the overall system considerably.
The rough sketch of the landscape is reasonably accurate, and downtown DC (at least the bits that were established prior to the 1950s) is quite solid, but the scale is definitely played with a bit, and of course, the most notable distinction is the vast underpopulation of every area that’s not downtown DC. Seriously, how does a pocket of 3-10 houses survive in pristine condition a dozen or two times pocked throughout the map, where everything else is absolutely leveled? And aside from Tenpenny Tower, almost no other apartments survive, just single-family-homes?
Well, I guess that makes sense. But then you could use that reasoning to excuse any differences in the worlds. Fiction being what it is, however, I suppose I have to accept that.
In case anyone’s confused, the atomic Great War happened in 2077, not the 1950s. The universe of the games is basically “what 1950s Americans would guess the future is like”, thus all the robots serving beer and whatnot.
But what I meant about the train is that I would think that a 1950s American would have guessed we’d have levitating trains or something. They didn’t “futurize” them at all, and in fact copied today’s style pretty closely.
You probably did. You can get off the metro at Rosslyn, walk across the bridge, and be in Georgetown in 10 minutes. But I wouldn’t say that the metro “goes to Georgetown”.
In case anyone’s interested, here is the Fallout timeline. The branching began right after WWII and had diverged pretty significantly by the end of the 1960s.
Chessic Sense especially, but others, too, thank you so much. The Metro lines being cut down to just three could be explained by a lot of them being caved in, I suppose. As it is, you can’t access some of them anyway.
I clicked on all of your links. Very cool.
Lute, thank you for that lovely Metro map, it helps when I am wandering around trying to figure out which Metro to take where. I haven’t taken Metro/subways very often in my life at all.
I love Fallout 3, and the fact that it is in D.C. I love wandering around and just figuring out how to get from place to place. I did go to the Bethesda offices, a bit north of the D.C. Downtown itself.
I tried Fallout 2, and just couldn’t get into it as much…but I did try it very late (only last year) so maybe I just couldn’t get that retro.
One more accuracy note: In the game, when you walk into the Museum of History, there’s a Woolly Mammoth in the main rotunda. If you walk into the real life National Museum of Natural History, there’s a Mammoth directly in the main rotunda. Where “Underworld” is is actually the ocean room, where there’s a big whale skeleton and a ton of other fossils, FWIW.
I put in a good 4-5 hours to the game yesterday (Snowpocalypse!), and I paid extra attention to the metro trains as I was tromping around the metro tunnels.
The trains only look like our real-world Metro cars in that they are metal cylinders with windows. Stylistically, they look very much like classic Greyhound buses, so that design is just as stuck in the 1950s aesthetic as everything else.
