Games themed around nuclear disasters have been around since Missile Command. Yet adding the idea of Chernobyl specifically into the heads of players makes the premise both simultaneously more tangible and more mysterious. The exclusion zone's dilapidated soviet architecture slowly being reclaimed by nature has become a style deployed by many games. Players don't actually see the power plant itself until right at the end of the game. All of its most significant mechanical ideas are taken from Stalker and Roadside Picnic, that notion of scavenging anomalous materials for profit from a strange and dangerous environment. From a perspective of play, the presence of Chernobyl has little bearing on the game. Shadow of Chernobyl takes this core idea and adapts it to the real exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power-plant. Shadow of Chernobyl draws from a number of influences, primarily the science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic, and Andrei Tarkovsky's loose 1977 adaptation Stalker, both of which are about groups of people attempting to retrieve valuable artefacts from a dangerous exclusion zone.  The main instigator in all this in this is S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, GSC Game World's semi open-world shooter from 2006. Chernobyl has been unusually influential in gaming, both as a direct inspiration for specific games, and indirectly through ideas borrowed those foundational titles. Video games invoke Chernobyl with surprising (perhaps alarming?) regularity. It's a decision that says a lot about the power of Chernobyl, and the dark mystique it has in the collective consciousness. The power plant as depicted in Shadow of Chernobyl. And yet Activision decided that the first thing the world saw of a game titled Modern Warfare would be a Soviet city abandoned in 1986. Call of Duty 4 is a game which features daring black-ops raids, contemporary middle-eastern conflicts, atomic explosions. I've always been fascinated by the decision-making process which led to that trailer being structured in that way. This was the world's first glimpse of Modern Warfare, the game which transformed Call of Duty - already a successful franchise, into the AAA behemoth that it remains today. As the camera tracks upward from the wheel's base, four words are spelled out in night-vision green.  The camera moves closer to the wheel, which is now revealed to be flaking with rust. We see tower-blocks, trees, and behind them both, a Ferris wheel silhouetted against a slate-grey sky. The camera tilts upward, revealing a flyover view of a city, the image desaturated and grainy, as if recorded on a 90s camcorder.

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