I was thinking it looked familiar in that opening scene.

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/700258/exclusive-heavy-rain-interview-quantic-dreams-david-cage-featuring-new-gameplay-footage.html

G4: How much research went into crafting an American setting when a Parisian team is behind the project? What difficulties did you face in generating a sense of authenticity?

DC: The difficulty when you want to set your story in another country and within another culture is to avoid making a postcard of this country as you imagine it seen from where you leave. We also wanted to avoid all the clichés that are usually used about the US. So before the project started, as I was writing it, we went to Philadelphia for two weeks with some people of the team and our cameras. I chose Philadelphia pretty much per chance. I liked M. Night Shyamalan’ s movies and when I checked where he was shooting, I realized he was from Philadelphia. So we booked a plane, took our bags and traveled to the East Coast of the U.S., not having a clue of what we would discover.

We spent a tough two weeks exploring the city with a movie scout taking us to the worst places, the poorest areas, and the abandoned factories, discovering another side of America that you don’t often see in Hollywood movies. We visited the houses of people, we saw kids living in the streets, streets with garbage that no one collects anymore, houses about to collapse where people were still living, schools built across the street of a petroleum installation, etc. We saw barbed wire all over the place, railways leading to nowhere, rusted bridges, and many other things.

The places we visited and the people we met within these two weeks were the real founding moment of Heavy Rain. If I could only transcribe 1% of what I saw and what I felt when I was there in the game, it would make me very happy.