The Cursed Apple: The Story Behind Deadlock's New York

Every Deadlock match takes place in the same city: the Cursed Apple, a supernatural take on New York. The name plays on the Big Apple, and the city is cursed in a very literal sense, as the battleground for the ritual.

This page is about the city as a place in the story. For lanes, objectives and routes as a player, see the map overview.

A real city, bent

The Cursed Apple borrows heavily from real New York:

• The three lanes, York, Broadway and Greenwich, are named after real Manhattan streets.
• Many of the buildings on the skyline are based on real New York buildings from the early 1900s.
• The Statue of Liberty stands in the harbour behind the docks on York.
• A bull and a bear statue sit near the bases, the old stock market symbols for rising and falling prices.

Then it adds what the real city never had: an Astral Gate’s legacy in Central Park, monsters in the alleys, and companies that sell spirit weapons on billboards.

Uptown and Downtown

The city is split between the two Patrons, and their halves say a lot about them:

	The Archmother’s side	The Hidden King’s side
Neighbourhood	Uptown	Downtown
Look	Upper-class white brick	Working-class red brick
Base	A neoclassical museum	A run-down factory full of giant speakers and microphones
Landmark	The City Mother Bank, behind her Walker on York	Old factories and railroad businesses

The lanes

Lane	Character	Landmarks
York	Industrial	The Stock Exchange, the Shipyard Docks and the Fairfax factories, plus old businesses like the Fairfax & Sons Railroad Co.
Broadway	Bright lights	Uptown, Times Square and Downtown, lined with billboards and neon
Greenwich	Overgrown	Umbria University, Central Park and the Brownstones, taken over by plant life

Central Park matters to the story: it’s where an Astral Gate opened during the first Maelstrom, the moment Warden’s parents realised the supernatural was real. Dynamo was the first to investigate the rift.

The districts

Between the lanes are four districts, each with its own flavour:

• The Theater District, inside a huge theatre under a glass dome.
• Chinatown, with lanterns, East Asian architecture and the Bell Tower.
• The Haunted Lot, rebuilt in City Never Sleeps around a basketball court.
• The Plaza District, where a statue of a Fairfax ancestor stands above an underground plaza filled with purple fog.

Advertising and companies

The Cursed Apple is a city that sells magic. Fairfax Industries, an arms maker specialising in spirit weapons, is everywhere: its crates are scattered across the map, its stock ticker (FFX) scrolls in the Stock Exchange, its statues stand in the Plaza and near the university, and its ads promise the “Home of Fair Trade”. Even the subway map in the tunnels is theirs. See factions of the city.

How the city has changed

The map has been rebuilt several times during development:

• Early internal versions were called street_test and dl_streets. Today’s map is dl_midtown.
• The bases were once named after Grand Central and Penn Station.
• Until February 25, 2025, the city had four lanes, including a purple one, with a museum in the middle. The rework cut it to three lanes, and that museum may live on as the Archmother’s base.
• City Never Sleeps (September 29, 2026) reworked the city again, adding Steam Vents, Haunts in place of the old jungle camps, and new areas like the Bell Tower and Sunken Plaza.