Snow, Drones and Soviet Tanks: The Siberia of X-Men 2: Clone Wars (1995)
X-Men 2: Clone Wars for the Sega Genesis presents one of the most familiar portrayals of Russia in video games: a frozen, industrial wasteland filled with outdated but deadly war machines, endless snowfall, and a general sense of bleak oppression. While it was hardly unique in this regard, the game is a near-textbook case of how Western developers distilled Russia into a handful of recognizable tropes.
Siberia: Russia as a Snow Wasteland
When a game needs to evoke Russia quickly, it usually skips over Moscow or St. Petersburg and goes straight to Siberia. Endless snowfields, blizzards, and jagged ice mountains have become the default shorthand for “Russian setting.” In Clone Wars, the very first stage drops players without warning into such a landscape. The blizzard mechanic—snowfall thickening and thinning with the wind—reinforces this hostile, inhospitable environment.
The reality is more complex. While Siberia is indeed vast and cold, it’s also home to more than 30 million people and contains cities such as Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Irkutsk, alongside major universities and cultural centers. Yet in Western pop culture, these urban realities are erased in favor of the snowbound frontier, a shorthand that stresses survival, isolation, and inhospitable wilderness.
Factories, Rust, and Radioactivity
The Russian landscape in Clone Wars is also heavily industrialized and filled with Soviet-era clichés about nuclear power. Players move through metal structures with piled barrels in rust-streaked complexes where radioactive barrels litter the environment as obstacles, being able to be detonated by two hits (one renders it dangerously damaged, with bubble-like fumes coming out) and having the ability to harm friend or foe alike in a fiery explosion. This aesthetic carries echoes of both Cold War paranoia and Western coverage of disasters such as Chernobyl, which cemented the image of Russia as a radiation polluted, decayed, and unsafe wasteland.
Of course, the country is more than collapsing smokestacks. Russia has long been an energy superpower, with functioning industrial hubs, aerospace facilities, and modernized plants. But games like Clone Wars flatten these realities into a ruined factoryscape, amplifying the stereotype of a nation defined by corrosion and nuclear danger.
Soviet-Era War Machines
Military hardware plays a central role in shaping this vision. In Clone Wars, hulking tanks and guns resemble a mashup of actual Soviet designs: the 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer, the 25 mm 72-K anti-aircraft gun, even hints of the gargantuan German Panzer VIII Maus. The result is a generic but unmistakably “Eastern Bloc” arsenal.
The game also features an anti-aircraft gun that resembles a cross between Soviet 25 mm automatic air defense gun M1940 (72-K) and ZPU-2 anti-aircraft twin guns 14.5 mm.
The stereotype here is that Russia is a land of heavy tanks where the Cold War never ended, where rusting but still-dangerous war machines are left scattered across the tundra. In reality, Soviet and Russian military practice did not simply leave tanks, artillery, or anti-aircraft guns abandoned in the snow as pop culture often suggests. Surplus or reserve equipment was usually kept in storage depots, hangars, or covered facilities to protect it from the elements. These sites, sometimes called bases for storage and repair of armaments and equipment (БХВТ, базы хранения вооружения и техники), held thousands of vehicles in relatively organized rows. Photographs from such depots (both Soviet-era and modern) show tanks and APCs lined up outdoors, but still inside secured perimeters, with many being periodically maintained.
Leaving complex machinery exposed to blizzards for extended periods would risk corrosion, frozen hydraulics, and electrical failures. The Red Army did maintain open-air storage lots for large numbers of older vehicles, especially in Siberia and the Urals, but these were guarded facilities, not random abandoned sites scattered across a snowy wasteland. And crucially, active combat equipment would be stationed at bases with heated garages or prepared shelters, not just sitting idle in the tundra.
So the stereotype—rusting Soviet war machines forgotten in the snow—is rooted in some visual truth (photos of outdoor storage rows), but it’s misleading. In reality, most equipment was stored with at least minimal protection and maintenance cycles, not casually abandoned in a blizzard. Soviet equipment was often rugged and effective, exported to dozens of countries, and in some cases still in use today. But Western media often interprets that durability as backwardness: old machines that refuse to die, serving as symbols of a stagnant system.
Oppression as Atmosphere
From the start, Clone Wars seeks to make Russia feel unwelcoming. The cold open — not a pun, the game actually starts abruptly — casts us immediately in a perpetual snowstorm in some isolated Siberian military outpost, where heavy tanks, metal structures, and endless drones patrolling about construct a dystopian mood. The soundtrack’s melancholic, ominous and menacing tones (each X-Man has their own musical variations) add to the sense of isolation in an alien wasteland. This is not just Russia — it’s a place well outside the comfort of our heroes, where hardship, militarization, and cold steel define each moment.
This bleakness, again, is part of the stereotype. While Russian history is indeed marked by authoritarianism, war, and industrial expansion, the artistic, cultural, and human dimensions of Russian life rarely appear in such portrayals. The West’s Russia is not Pushkin or Tarkovsky, but steel girders, smokestacks, and marching soldiers.
Russia as Robots
Perhaps the most telling touch is the choice of enemies. While the game’s main villains are the alien Phalanx, the Russian stage is populated with robotic drones resembling antiquated sentry units, complete with radar dishes. Even The Hand ninjas, who appear alongside them, are stated to be robots, a convenient workaround for Sega’s censorship rules on violence. This plays into another stereotype: Russia as a land of soulless automatons, whether mechanical or human. Cold, efficient, and dehumanized, these robots serve as a metaphor for an authoritarian system that reduces individuality to machinery.
Conclusion
While X-Men 2: Clone Wars is ultimately a sci-fi superhero game, its Russian stage is built from a template that still shapes Western depictions today: Siberian blizzards, industrial ruin, surplus Soviet tanks, oppressive bunkers, and robotic enemies. This Russia exists more in pop culture than reality, but it is effective shorthand — instantly recognizable to players raised on Cold War imagery.
The real Russia is more varied and contradictory, with thriving cities, cultural richness, and complex modern industry. Yet for game designers of the early 1990s, it was enough to reach into a Cold War toybox of snow, steel, and surplus hardware. The result is one of the clearest examples of how stereotypes become level design, and how Russia became, in gaming, synonymous with Siberia, snow, and Soviet steel.
X-Men 2: Clone Wars
Country: 
USA
Initial release: 1995
Platforms: Sega Genesis
Composer: Kurt Harland (Information Society)
Genres: Platformer, Action
Developer: HeadGames / Sega Technical Institute
Publisher: Sega
About: X-Men 2: Clone Wars is a side-scrolling action platformer where players control various X-Men against the alien Phalanx. Its Russian stage, set in a Siberian blizzard filled with drones and tanks, is one of the clearest examples of Cold War stereotypes turned into level design. It remains a striking showcase of how Russia was visualized in 16-bit gaming.
References
- Wikipedia: X-Men 2: Clone Wars
- Baev, P. (1996). Russia’s Military Doctrines and Storage Practices. Jane’s Defence Weekly.
- Wikipedia: 25 mm automatic air defense gun M1940 (72-K)
- Weaponsystems.net: ZPU-2
- Army Recognition: ZPU-2 anti-aircraft twin gun (14.5 mm)
- All-andorra.com: 25 mm 72-K