James Joyce's Ulysses is one ordinary day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, told in eighteen episodes through Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, who starts the day in a tower by the sea. This route walks the day in the order the novel runs it: from the Martello tower at Sandycove where it opens to Howth Head, where Molly Bloom's memory ends it with a yes.
Almost every stop is a place you can still stand in: the tower where Joyce stayed in 1904, the strand Stephen walks, the street of the chemist's where Bloom buys soap, the cemetery of the funeral, the pub where he eats his sandwich, the library where he passes between Stephen and Mulligan, the quay of the Ormond Hotel and the maternity hospital. The last stop is a recollection rather than a setting: the novel never says where on Howth Head the two of them lay.
Los Santos feels like Los Angeles because it is Los Angeles, compressed. Grand Theft Auto V squeezes the city's most famous miles into one playable map, from a hillside sign to a Venice boardwalk.
This tour visits seven real stand-ins behind the fiction: the hillside sign, a movie palace, a luxury shopping street, an observatory, a pier, a beach and a towered folk-art park. Every pin marks the real place, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. Expect crowds at the beach and on Hollywood Boulevard, and quiet at the towers.
In Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (MachineGames, 2024), set in 1937, the trail of a stolen mummified cat runs from the Vatican and Giza to Shanghai and Sukhothai. Indy races the Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss around this "Great Circle" of sacred sites — a story Todd Howard conceived for the game.
The circle and its secret are pure adventure fiction, but its stops are real: the Vatican, Giza, wartime Shanghai, the ruined Thai capital of Sukhothai and the ziggurat of Ur. The designers rebuilt them from books and photographs as they would have looked in the 1930s. This route follows the main story.
Egypt, 49 BC. Bayek, the last Medjay protector of the Siwa Oasis, loses his son to a band of masked men, and his hunt for them leads him into the war between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII, and to the arrival of Julius Caesar. Ubisoft's 2017 game ends with Bayek and his wife Aya founding the secret brotherhood that the whole series grows from.
The studio worked with Egyptologists and historians, enlarged cities for a sense of "pharaonic scale", and later added a combat-free Discovery Tour. This route follows the main story through the real places it uses, from the oracle at Siwa to the spot in Rome where Caesar died. Bayek and the secret orders are fiction; the queen, the generals and the murders mostly are not.
In December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species.
The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.
In May 1863 a Hamburg professor of mineralogy decodes a 300-year-old note in runes: go down the crater of Snæfell in Iceland and you will reach the centre of the Earth. Within days he drags his reluctant nephew Axel north by train, steamer and schooner, hires a silent Icelandic guide named Hans and climbs into the volcano.
Verne sets up the impossible with a timetable you could almost follow today — Altona station, Kiel, Copenhagen, Reykjavík, the hamlet of Stapi below the glacier. What happens underground is pure fiction, but the way out is real: three months later the travellers are spat out of Stromboli, an island volcano off Sicily, more than 3,000 km from where they went in.
In 1961 the Freedom Riders took two buses from Washington, D.C. through Rock Hill, Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, to test the Supreme Court's ruling against segregated bus terminals. In Alabama a mob burned a bus while police looked away; hundreds more riders ended up in Mississippi's jails and Parchman Farm.
The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.
The Oregon Trail follows real landmarks of the 2,170-mile trail: Independence, Missouri, Chimney Rock in Nebraska, Independence Rock in Wyoming and Oregon City at the end. Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote it in 1971; the 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, made buying oxen, fording rivers and dying of dysentery a classroom staple, and the series has sold more than 65 million copies.
The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.
