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Zombies on the prowl
Gamers blast undead at virtual Point Lookout
Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Image courtesy of Bethesda Softworks
Violent, irradiated beasties haunt the landscape of the fictional Point Lookout in the Fallout 3 expansion pack. The famed lighthouse makes an appearance here, but it looks nothing like the real Point Lookout.
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Southern Maryland recently made its debut in the world of video games with the introduction last month of the Point Lookout expansion for Bethesda Softworks' popular Fallout 3.
But you would be hard pressed to recognize it.
While retaining the name of St. Mary's County's most popular tourist destination, the game's scenery and characters little resemble the park's history, geography, geology or landmarks. But it will serve as the first introduction to the Southern Maryland region for most of the 4.7 million players of Fallout 3.
"I don't think it's representative of Point Lookout," said Christy Bright, the park's manager, after viewing screen shots and video from the game.
Part of the disconnect comes from the Fallout 3 timeline, which deviates from real-world history starting in the late 1960s and culminates in a 21st-century nuclear war between China and the United States. Fallout 3 is set in the bomb-blasted ruins of 23rd -century Washington, D.C., and its surrounding areas.
The alternate timeline explains the radiation zombies, creepy cultists and genetically deformed hillbillies that permeate Fallout 3's Point Lookout, but it does little to explain other glaring alterations to real-world geography.
Point Lookout State Park was founded in 1965, but the first scene that greets Fallout 3 players is the ruins of an Ocean City-style commercial boardwalk, complete with Ferris Wheel. Point Lookout once served as an upscale recreation destination in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the Fenwick Inn burned down in 1878. The 1920 Point Lookout Hotel was abandoned by the time the park was established and later burned down.
The famous haunted lighthouse makes an appearance in the game, but it is not the 1830 house with a cupola which currently stands on the point. The fictional version is a tall, Atlantic Coast cone tower.
"It would have been nice if they had gotten the lighthouse correct," Bright said.
The game developers also created a fictional "Calvert Mansion" for players to explore. Lord Calvert was given the rights to build a house near Point Lookout in 1641. However, the house was not built until 1805 by James Richardson. The manor currently operates as a private bed and breakfast in Scotland, just north of the state park. It is a colonial plantation house, not the sprawling, Victorian manse depicted in the game.
Nancy Dick, who own operates St. Michael's Manor along with her husband, Joe, said that Point Lookout may have a lot of ghosts, but she hasn't seen a single zombie. She isn't too worried about the Fallout 3 game giving visitors the wrong impression about the area.
"I think people would laugh at it," Dick said.
The game's gothic "Ark and Dove Cathedral" is a nod to the area's Catholic heritage, but it too was fashioned out of whole cloth by the developer. Strangely, Fort Lincoln, one of the real Point Lookout's few historical landmarks, is nowhere to be seen. The real mass grave of Confederate soldiers has been replaced in the game with a graveyard of tombstones.
"They got some of the history right, but not all of it," Bright said.
The developers also gave a nod to the point's history as a Civil War prison camp by including the ruins of a prison camp for Chinese soldiers from the game's mythical World War III.
The geography of the game roughly mimics the current-day layout of the point, but the game developers completely altered the peninsula's geology, featuring rocky coastlines and a subplot involving limestone caverns and natural gas. This would be a humorous notion to officials who spent much time and public money installing rocky riprap in recent decades to prevent the clay and sand peninsula from eroding away.
The local flora is not well represented either, given that there are more glowing mushrooms than pine stands. "There's not one pine tree" in the game, Bright remarked.
Joel Burgess, a Bethesda designer who worked on the Point Lookout expansion made no attempt to pretend that the game is anything but entertainment. He confessed that he and his fellow designers did not even visit Point Lookout. Burgess explained that the point's proximity to Washington had more to do with the game's name than anything else.
"We wanted to find somewhere with reasonable proximity to D.C.," Burgess said. "We didn't want it to look anything like D.C."
The team took much of its inspiration from Florida and Louisiana swamps, Burgess said, as well as the cratered landscape of Turtledove Island in the Chesapeake Bay, a former Navy bombing range.
"Really, the gameplay [idea] is what drove the design," Burgess said.
Popular apocalypse
Point Lookout is the fourth expansion pack for the popular post-apocalyptic Fallout 3 video game, which has sold an estimated 4.7 million copies since October 2008. Like the expansions before it, which included locales such as Pittsburgh and Anchorage, Alaska, the Point Lookout expansion allows players to venture outside the nuclear ruins of Washington, D.C.
The Point Lookout expansion has been widely praised by the gaming press and fans. It is currently available for download on the Windows PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game. Playstation 3 owners will likely have to wait until later this year to play it.
