S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: The Chernobyl Zone and Pripyat

In the game, the Zone is based on the real Chernobyl exclusion zone, which Soviet authorities first drew as a 30-kilometre circle around the power plant. Stalkers who enter it carry an anomaly detector that beeps faster the closer they get to a danger. The developers rebuilt bridges, railways, buildings and abandoned vehicles from photographs and in-person visits. The word has an older echo: liquidators and scientists inside the ruined reactor building called themselves stalkers from 1986 onward.

Location precision: The game's Zone is a compressed version of the real one; the pin marks the zone's general area.

The Red Forest appears in all four main S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games as part of their game world. The real forest earned its name in 1986: the area received the highest doses of radiation from the disaster, and the trees died from it.

Location precision: The forest has no sharp edge, and the game's version is not a map of the real one; the pin marks the area.

Chernobyl-2 was a Soviet military installation close to the power plant, home to the giant Duga over-the-horizon radar. Duga operated from July 1976 to December 1989, and shortwave listeners nicknamed it the Russian Woodpecker for its tapping signal. A Duga array is a playable location in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl.

Location precision: The pin marks the Chernobyl-2 site; the game's radar is its own version of the place.

In Call of Pripyat the player is sent into the Zone to investigate helicopter crash sites on behalf of the government, and Yaniv railway station is one of the game's important locations. The real station was commissioned in 1925, and the village and station of Yaniv gave rise to the city of Pripyat. Before 1986 it was served by the long-distance express train Moscow-Khmelnytskyi.

The game's Pripyat is directly modeled on the real city, only smaller, and it is moved next to the power station although the real city lies north-west of it. In Shadow of Chernobyl a device called the Brain Scorcher blocks the path to the city until the player disables it. The real Pripyat was founded on 4 February 1970 and had grown to 49,360 people when it was evacuated on 27 April 1986. Its Ferris wheel, in the amusement park, was due to open five days after the disaster.

The game ends where the real disaster began. Inside the plant's irradiated sarcophagus the player discovers the Wish Granter, and Monolith cultists are programmed to defend the plant against further incursions. On 26 April 1986 reactor No. 4 suffered a catastrophic meltdown during a safety test. The destroyed reactor was encased in a concrete and lead sarcophagus in 1986, followed in 2016 by a large steel confinement shelter.