"Fifty-thousand people used to live here...now it's a ghost town."

I was checking out some photo blogs of "The Dead Zone" today, aka "Pluto's Realm, aka The Exclusion Zone, aka Chernobyl, Ukraine. There is something very creepy, yet alluring about photos of abandoned cities; they have a very post-apocalyptic feel. Then I realized I had seen a few of these places before...in Call of Duty 4! If you have ever played the game, I'm sure you will find several of the photos familiar. Infinity Ward did such a great job with that game, it's no wonder it got 10 out of 10 scores across the board.

This is the second time I have related what I saw in a game world to locations in the real world. The first was on my trip to Greece, which reminded me vividly of Elderscrolls: Oblivion (which reminds me...I still haven't posted the pics from Greece yet). So it begs the question: Is art imitating life or vice versā?

Here are a couple of pics from the two pages I visited, the links to the sites are:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dmcmill/Photographs.html
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter3.html

The last photo is an in-game screenshot of the Farris wheel with the bumper car building in the lower left, from the level "One Shot, One Kill", from Call of Duty 4.

EDIT: After writing all this up and finding the pics...I then ran across this other blog with the same story. Its got a couple extra & different pics and more story than mine, so I thought I'd link it too.