The Boy's Word: Blood on the Asphalt is set in Kazan but was filmed in Yaroslavl; its story comes from the real Kazan phenomenon of teenage gangs in Sukonnaya Sloboda, Privolzhsky District, Novo-Tatarskaya Sloboda and Sotsgorod.
The route follows the real history behind the 2023 series, from street fights in the 1940s to the 1978 motorcycle run, then to Naberezhnye Chelny and Yaroslavl, where the series was cast and shot. The series invents its gang territories, so all pins are approximate.
The 2003 road movie Bumer opens in Moscow, in Pechatnikov Lane and on the Savvinskaya and Berezhkovskaya embankments, and runs out of town to Raduzhny and Kolomna, where its provincial scenes were shot.
Four car thieves flee Moscow in a stolen BMW and the film follows them from the capital's embankments down to a small town. The pins are approximate: they follow reported filming spots, not exact frames.
Brigada is a crime series about four Moscow friends, Sasha Bely, Kosmos, Pchyola and Fil, who swear loyalty to each other on Sparrow Hills at dawn in 1989. Its plot visits the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment skyscraper and the Uzbekistan restaurant on Neglinnaya Street, and the series was written at Mosfilm and partly filmed in Taldom.
The route walks through the places the plot names in Moscow, then the studio where the script was written and the town where a station scene set in Chechnya was shot.
The Goonies is set in Astoria, Oregon, where the Walsh family's foreclosure sends Mikey and Data into the attic and out to Cannon Beach. The film used the old Clatsop County Jail, the Flavel House, the real house at 368 38th Street, Ecola State Park, Haystack Rock and Goat Rock Beach in California.
This route follows the Goonies from the jailbreak through the Goon Docks, the museum, the bike ride to Ecola, the Fratelli hideout and the underground ship to the final beach.
Hocus Pocus is set in Salem, Massachusetts, on Halloween, and filmed at Pioneer Village, Salem Common, the Ropes Mansion and Old Town Hall.
The route follows the film from the 1693 prologue at Pioneer Village through the high school on Essex Street, Salem Common, Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, Max's house on Ocean Avenue and the Ropes Mansion, then to the town party at Old Town Hall and the Park Plaza Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. Most Salem scenes are exteriors; the interiors were studio work in Burbank.
Dirty Dancing is set at a fictional Catskills resort but was filmed at Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia and around Lake Lure, North Carolina. In the summer of 1963, Baby Houseman falls for dance instructor Johnny Castle and takes his partner's place at a nearby resort.
This route follows the film from the Houseman family's arrival to the final lift, through the places that stood in for Kellerman's and the Catskills resort often cited as its model: the lodge and lake at Mountain Lake, the old boys' camp and golf green at Lake Lure, and Grossinger's in New York.
The 1999 Kargil War was fought on the ridges above the Srinagar–Leh highway, around Kargil, Dras, Tololing and Tiger Hill in Ladakh, after Pakistani forces occupied heights on the Indian side of the Line of Control. India calls its campaign Operation Vijay.
The route goes from the highway at Kargil to the battles for Tololing, Tiger Hill and Point 4875, and ends at the Dras war memorial. Both Indian and Pakistani accounts are noted, and many of the heights remain military ground.
The Declaration of Independence was debated, written and adopted in a few streets of Old City Philadelphia: City Tavern, Carpenters' Hall, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell are all within a short walk.
The route runs from the tavern meeting of May 1774 and the First Continental Congress, through Jefferson's drafting in June 1776, to the vote of 2 July, the adoption on 4 July and the public reading on 8 July. The Liberty Bell's famous ringing is more legend than record.
Office Romance (1977) is set in Moscow, and its statistical office is assembled from three places: the Petrovka 3/6 facade, Mosfilm studio sets and a rooftop in Bolshoy Gnezdnikovsky Lane.
Eldar Ryazanov's comedy follows a shy statistician and his stern boss, with a city chosen carefully to show who lives where.
This route visits the film's real locations, the studio where the office was built, and the homes and station that give each character a place in Moscow.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day was shot across Los Angeles and beyond in 1990 and 1991: the Sixth Street Bridge, the Santa Monica Place mall, the Bull Creek spillway and the Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana all appear in the film.
This route follows nine of those real places in story order, from the biker bar where the T-800 picks up its clothes to the steel mill where it dies. Some have vanished — the Sixth Street Viaduct was demolished and the Corral Bar is now a library — and one is in Fremont, not Los Angeles at all.
Jaws was filmed on Martha's Vineyard, which stood in for Amity Island: Edgartown, State Beach and the Jaws Bridge.
Steven Spielberg began shooting there on 2 May 1974, using the island's whaling town, its barrier beaches and the little Chappaquiddick ferry as the summer resort the shark terrorises. This route follows the film from the opening bonfire at South Beach to the last shot off Cape Poge Light. In between are Brody's beach-closing signs at Water and Main, the Kintner attack at Joseph Sylvia State Beach, the shark's run under the American Legion Memorial Bridge into Sengekontacket Pond, Quint's vanished workshop at Menemsha and the open water between Oak Bluffs and East Chop where the Orca hunts.
From 1968 Carlos Castaneda published best-sellers about his apprenticeship to don Juan Matus, a Yaqui sorcerer from Sonora: peyote, power, and finally a leap into an abyss. They came out as anthropology and earned him UCLA degrees. Most scholars now read them as fiction, and the author reinvented his own life story too.
This route follows two maps at once. One holds the places the records confirm: Cajamarca, Lima, UCLA and Westwood. The other holds the places the books name, from a Greyhound depot in Nogales to a bench in Oaxaca and the Toltec warriors of Tula. Each stop's accuracy label tells you which map it belongs to.
On 28 July 2010 Okabe Rintaro and Mayuri Shiina walk into the Radio Kaikan for a conference, and Okabe finds Kurisu Makise lying in a pool of blood. A text message sent moments later reaches his friend Daru a week early, and the PhoneWave in their Akihabara lab turns out to send mail into the past.
The route follows the real streets behind the visual novel and anime: the station exit, the Radio Kaikan hall where the story starts, the lab above a television repair shop, Mayuri's maid café, Ruka's shrine and the gyudon shop where the lab members eat. The old Radio Kaikan was demolished in 2011, so the present building is a 2014 replacement.
Two Naughty Dog adventures, two treasure hunts: Nathan Drake chases Marco Polo's Cintamani Stone from an Istanbul museum through Borneo and Nepal to the legend of Shambhala, then follows Francis Drake's secret to a lost city in the Arabian sands.
The route follows both games in order. The legendary cities are invented or borrowed, and the game rarely names a real site, so every pin marks the country, city or region behind the chapter.
Ubisoft sent a team of developers across Bolivia in 2012 and built a cartel-ridden version of the country from what they saw. The game's story is fiction, and Bolivia's government complained about it in 2017.
This route follows the real landmarks the game's map recreates: La Paz, the Yungas Road, the Uyuni train cemetery, Laguna Colorada and the silver mines of Potosí. All pins are approximate, since the game's world is fictionalised.
Two years after a pandemic turns millions of people into feral Freakers, outlaw biker Deacon St. John rides central Oregon as a drifter and bounty hunter. He believes his wife Sarah died when a NERO helicopter lifted her out of the outbreak — until he learns she was moved to a military outpost at Crater Lake.
Days Gone's Oregon is a compressed, renamed version of the real high desert: Bend becomes Farewell, Black Butte Ranch becomes Iron Butte Ranch, and the militia holds Crater Lake. The route follows Deacon's ride from the opening evacuation to the volcanic lake where the story ends, through the hot springs, small towns and logging country that Bend Studio used as its model.
Age of Empires II follows Joan of Arc from a French army camp at Vaucouleurs to the stake at Rouen. The designers said they deferred to history wherever it did not interfere with gameplay, and the campaign's spine — Orléans, Patay, Reims, Paris — is close to the record. But the game also bends the story, placing Joan at a battle she missed and turning a failed assault on Paris into a betrayal. This route follows the campaign's stops in order and sets each one beside what the sources say happened there.
Lost Heaven, Illinois, never existed. The game's studio built it as a 1930s Chicago: an American city split by rivers, its downtown a wall of new skyscrapers, its West Side holding Italian and Chinese neighborhoods, its fortunes made on Prohibition bootlegging. The studio called Chicago of the 1920s and 1930s its real-world inspiration.
This route follows six real Chicago places that stand behind Lost Heaven's geography and mood: the river at Wolf Point, the elevated Loop, the Board of Trade, Taylor Street, Chinatown and a jazz club with Prohibition history. The pins mark real Chicago sites, not in-game locations; Lost Heaven is fictional and the game maps no district one-to-one onto the city.
The Driver series began in 1999 as a car-chase game and grew into a tour of real cities: Miami, Los Angeles and New York in the first game, Havana, Las Vegas and Rio de Janeiro in Driver 2, Nice and Istanbul in Driver 3, and a fictionalised San Francisco in the 2011 sequel. Tanner's undercover work runs from a Miami parking garage to a presidential car, a Rio climax beneath Christ the Redeemer and the Golden Gate Bridge.
This route follows the series city by city, from Ocean Drive's Art Deco hotels to the Las Vegas Strip and the Bosphorus. Some stops are city-level pins because the games recreate whole urban areas rather than single buildings; only Christ the Redeemer and the Golden Gate Bridge are pinned exactly.
Life is Strange is set on the Oregon coast and True Colors in Colorado: Arcadia Bay draws on Astoria and Garibaldi, Haven Springs on Idaho Springs and Georgetown. Max Caulfield comes home to a missing girl and a storm only she can see; Alex Chen arrives to meet the brother she barely knows, then stays to solve his death.
The route follows the games in order, from Cape Meares and the Oregon towns behind Arcadia Bay to Idaho Springs, Georgetown, Nederland and Marble, the Colorado towns behind Haven Springs.
In December 2021 private detective Takayuki Yagami comes to Isezaki Ijincho, a recreation of Yokohama's Isezakichō, to investigate bullying at Seiryo High School. The case grows into a murder inquiry that pulls him through the shopping street, Chinatown and the waterfront.
The route follows the game's Yokohama from Kannai Station, where Yagami and Masaharu Kaito arrive, along Isezaki Road, through the Chinatown meeting that starts the case, to Hamakita Park (the real Yamashita Park) and the Basha-kaidō drone races. The model blends Sakuragichō and Hinodechō with Isezakichō, so the map is no scale copy.
Test Drive Unlimited sent players around Oʻahu's 1,000 miles of roads in 2006; The Crew Motorfest returned to a scaled-down island in 2023, with a car-culture festival at its centre. Both treat the island as a stage, one for a free-roam lifestyle racer and the other for a themed racing playground.
This route follows a road-trip loop from Honolulu Airport through Waikiki, Diamond Head, Hanauma Bay and the North Shore to Haleʻiwa, then back south to Pearl Harbor. Pins mark the real places; the games shrink the island and invent some of the roads in between.
Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West cross the American West from Colorado Springs and Denver to Yellowstone and drowned San Francisco. A thousand years after the old world fell to Faro's machines, Nora outcast Aloy travels to uncover what destroyed it.
This route follows both Horizon games from the red rocks above Colorado Springs to the drowned streets of San Francisco, pairing each stop with the real landmark behind it. Guerrilla compresses the map — in-game locations are not exactly where they are in the real world — so the pins mark real stand-ins, not exact game coordinates.
Akito wakes after a traffic crash in a Shibuya emptied by a masked occultist's fog, sharing his body with the spirit KK and able to see the Marebito that now fill the streets. Tango Gameworks built the district as a condensed, walkable stage rather than a straight copy, keeping landmarks, borrowing back streets and folding in a few districts from elsewhere in Tokyo.
The route follows the game from the scramble crossing and the station through Center Gai, Dōgenzaka and the 109 stand-in, then north to a borrowed Yanaka Ginza and across town to the Tokyo Tower finale. Pins mark the real places; the game's map moves some of them closer together.
