That specific area the entire game takes place in was mostly isolated far from the coastline and the mountainous region made it very defendable. That location conveniently also had the headquarters of the creator of the plague and the source of most of the tech and funding necessary for the Zero Dawn project. The Faro Plague, the massive army of self-replicating, biomass consuming mindless robots started in a war-torn country in the eastern hemisphere, so within months Europe and Asia were reduced to nothing. They mention through text files and the audio clips that some locations for vaults or stores were overwhelmed and priceless information or genetic samples were lost. The game also says that if Operation Enduring Victory failed one day sooner the entire project could have been scrapped and it still cut it too tight to get 100% of the project done in time, being forced to scrap some last minute ideas. But they did say that other Cradles were set up in other parts of the world, too. Colorado was just a convenient story location. The game couldn't take place in New York and manage to still have all the story beats it does because you can't convince me to jump through a hoop that big and tell me a bunker in the mountains is less defensible than a massive city right on the water. No reason why the setting couldn't have originally been in Mongolia or Tibet, though, or the heart of Africa.
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