Fallout 3: The Real Washington of the Capital Wasteland

The first thing the Lone Wanderer sees outside Vault 101 is this obelisk: the Washington Monument stands in the distance, a landmark meant to show where Washington, D.C. lies. Later the Brotherhood of Steel turns the monument into a radio tower for Galaxy News Radio, and the player must fetch the Virgo II Moon Lander's satellite dish from the Museum of Technology and install it on top. The real monument is 555 feet tall, completed in 1884 and the world's tallest structure until the Eiffel Tower; an elevator still carries visitors to the observation floor.

Visitor guidance: Security screening is at the east entrance; the monument stands on the National Mall.

In Fallout 3 the Mall is a battlefield. Trenches run across it and factions fight for control, so crossing the open ground between the monument and the Capitol means running a gauntlet. The real Mall is the same 1.2-mile axis, a National Park Service landscape bordered by Smithsonian museums and memorials, and it draws about 24 million visitors a year. The game's version is wrecked and militarised; the real one is where the capital gathers for protests, rallies and presidential inaugurations.

Visitor guidance: The Mall is open public parkland; the Smithsonian museums along it keep their own hours.

In the game the Archives is a treasure vault with a comic guard: a robot in a powdered wig believes it is Button Gwinnett, a Founding Father, and stands over the Declaration of Independence. The Lone Wanderer can take the document and carry it back to a history lover. The real building at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue holds the original Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights, displayed in the rotunda, known as the Charters of Freedom, since 1952. It opened in 1935, and the rotunda entrance is on Constitution Avenue.

Visitor guidance: The rotunda entrance is on Constitution Avenue; the research entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue is separate.

The White House appears only as ruins. The developers had not modelled the building, so they made it a giant crater and explained that it was one of the locations targeted by nuclear attacks. The game shows the remnants of the White House around the hole. The real house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was begun in 1792, occupied by John Adams in 1800 and burned by the British in 1814. Public tours are arranged through Congressional representatives or embassies and require a background check.

Visitor guidance: Tours must be requested in advance through a Congressional office or an embassy; expect a background check.

Washington's Metro is the game's connective tissue. The engine could not hold the whole city in one piece, so the developers split the city into zones joined by Metro tunnels, and the player walks the platforms between them. The real system opened in 1976 and now has 98 stations; its underground halls are known for coffered concrete vaults modelled on the Pantheon. Metro Center, where four lines meet, is a useful stand-in for the network the game turns into a survival route.

Location precision: The game treats the Metro as a network rather than one station; the pin marks Metro Center, the real system's four-line transfer point.

Visitor guidance: Metro Center is a transfer station where four lines meet.

Project Purity is the heart of the plot, and it sits in the Jefferson Memorial: a water purifier built there was meant to clean the irradiated water of the Tidal Basin and the Potomac. The Enclave storms the memorial, James sacrifices himself to protect the purifier, and the last act is a Brotherhood march on it behind the robot Liberty Prime. The real memorial was dedicated in 1943, on Jefferson's 200th birthday; its 19-foot bronze statue looks out over the Tidal Basin and the cherry trees.

Visitor guidance: The memorial is open to the public on the Tidal Basin; the cherry trees around it date from a 1912 gift from Japan.

The Enclave's base is Raven Rock, an underground bunker near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, nicknamed the underground Pentagon. In Fallout 3 the Lone Wanderer is captured by Colonel Autumn and taken there, and escapes after meeting President Eden, an artificial intelligence. The real complex was planned in 1948 as a Cold War continuity-of-government site, with operations centres for all four armed services. It remains a U.S. military installation.

Broken Steel continues after the main quest, with the Lone Wanderer waking at the Citadel, the Brotherhood of Steel's headquarters inside the former Pentagon. The game turns the real home of the Department of Defense into a Brotherhood base. The real Pentagon was built in about 16 months and dedicated in January 1943; its five rings hold 17.5 miles of corridor and about 23,000 military and civilian staff. The Pentagon Memorial beside it opened in September 2008, with 184 benches, one for each victim of the September 11 attack on the building.