The Serpent You Climb a Tower to See

Ride west out of Van Horn, up into the wooded ridges of Roanoke, and Red Dead Redemption 2 puts a snake in the ground. It is a named point of interest — Serpent Mound — a long earthen body undulating across a forest clearing, its edges picked out in stone, a tight spiral at the tail and a hollow oval at the head. There is a rusting tower on the north side. Climb it, look down, and Arthur takes out his journal and draws what he sees: “Here’s that serpent shaped mound.” Down in the oval, if you have been following the Poisonous Trail, the third treasure map is waiting.

That tower is the detail worth stopping on, because Rockstar did not invent it. The real Serpent Mound runs 411 meters across a bluff in Adams County, Ohio, and stands barely a meter high — which means that from anywhere on the ground it reads as a series of disconnected ridges, not a serpent at all. In 1908 the Columbus Wire and Iron Works bolted three tons of steel into a 25-foot observation tower beside it, and ever since, seeing Serpent Mound has meant climbing something. A game about a man with a sketchbook worked out the same solution independently, or borrowed it faithfully; either way, RDR2 is one of the few places in fiction that gets the problem right. The mound is not hard to reach. It is hard to see.

Everything else the game moves. Roanoke Ridge is dense Appalachian forest in a state that does not exist, roughly five hundred miles east of where the real serpent lies, and the in-game effigy is compressed and reworked rather than surveyed. That is a fair trade for a monument no one can firmly date: the archaeologists themselves cannot agree whether Adena builders raised it around 300 BCE or Fort Ancient builders around 1070 CE.

Civilization VII takes the opposite approach entirely. Since the Tecumseh and Shawnee Pack, Serpent Mound is an Exploration Age Wonder — flat grassland only, +4 Influence, and Science and Production poured into every unique improvement in the settlement. The Shawnee build it faster, but anyone can build it, anywhere, which is how you end up with a great Ohio serpent coiled inside a Greek city. The real one is not portable in the slightest. It was laid along the edge of one particular plateau, above one particular creek, on ground thrown up by a meteorite impact three hundred million years ago, with its head pointed at the spot where the sun sets on the longest day of the year. Move it a mile and the alignment breaks. Move it to Athens and all you have left is the shape of a snake — which, to be fair, is precisely what both games are after.