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.
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.
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.
In the spring of 1989, Henry leaves Boulder for a summer job as a fire lookout in Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest. His only company is Delilah, the voice on the other end of a walkie-talkie, until fireworks at a lake, a ransacked tower and a fenced research camp turn the job into a mystery.
The route follows the game's places and the real Wyoming behind them: the bar where Henry meets Julia, the Cody rodeo the characters talk about, the Shoshone forest still marked by the 1988 Yellowstone fires, and stand-ins for the fictional Two Forks tower, Jonesy Lake, Wapiti Station, Cave 452 and Thorofare Lookout.
inFAMOUS 2 builds New Marais from real New Orleans: the French Quarter, Bayou St. John, Oak Alley, Fort Jackson and the Lower Ninth Ward. Cole MacGrath flees ruined Empire City to a Louisiana city ruled by the demagogue Joseph Bertrand and needs a scientist, a device and power cores to beat the Beast.
New Marais is Sucker Punch's New Orleans: a fictional city assembled from the French Quarter, above-ground cemeteries, plantation houses, a Civil War fort, the bayous and the flooded districts left by a hurricane. This route follows Cole's story through seven of those stand-ins, from the swamp where he lands to the cathedral tower where the game ends.
In January 1981 a CIA team led by Russell Adler hunts Perseus, a Soviet spy Adler believed dead. The trail runs from an Amsterdam bar and a Vietnam flashback to East Berlin, the KGB's Lubyanka and a Cuban firefight, before reaching the Solovetsky Islands. The route follows the campaign's real places in mission order and keeps the game's story apart from the real history of each place. A final stop marks the alternate ending at Duga.
In August 2010 a Bohemia Interactive team went to Lemnos to gather references, and came back with the material for Altis, the island where Arma 3 is set. Two years later two of the studio's developers were arrested on the same island and held for 129 days on suspicion of spying. After the arrest the game's main island, until then called Limnos, was renamed Altis; Stratis kept its name.
The route follows the real island from Myrina and its castle, past a church with no roof and a miniature desert, to the airport and the old Allied base at Moudros, then across the water to Agios Efstratios. Arma 3's war is set in 2034–2035; the harbours, theatre and dunes are not.
Haikyu!! is set in Miyagi Prefecture, but its creator Haruichi Furudate grew up in Karumai, a small town in Iwate, and much of the manga's school and streetscape is drawn from it. Fans turned the town into a pilgrimage stop, and a town-made walking map marks the spots that "look just like" the story.
This route follows the real places behind Karasuno in story order: the electronics shop where Hinata first sees volleyball on television, the gymnasium where he loses to Kageyama and vows revenge, the school that became Karasuno High, the shop where coach Ukai minds the counter, the running-course slope, the supermarket behind Shimada Mart, the Sendai arena that hosts the Miyagi qualifiers, the junior high whose staircase became Shinzen High, and the diner behind the Karasuno canteen.
Thomas Cromwell rises from a Putney childhood to become Henry VIII's most trusted minister, then falls in the same Tudor politics he mastered. Hilary Mantel's trilogy follows him from Cardinal Wolsey's household through the Reformation, Anne Boleyn's rise and execution, and his own last years.
This route traces the places that anchor the story: Cromwell's birthplace and London house, Wolsey's palaces at York Place and Esher, the abbey where Wolsey died, Westminster Abbey for Anne's coronation, the Seymour seat that gives the novels their title, Hampton Court, and the Tower. The 2015 television adaptation used Dover Castle for the Tower of London and Penshurst Place for Whitehall.
Percy Jackson is a twelve-year-old boy in New York City who has just learned that the Greek gods are real — and that Zeus's master bolt is missing. With Annabeth and Grover, he has ten days to cross the country, find the bolt and reach the Underworld beneath Los Angeles before a war breaks out on Olympus.
Rick Riordan's 2005 novel turns real American landmarks into monster stops: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Montauk beach, the Gateway Arch, a Denver water park, a Las Vegas casino that eats time, the Santa Monica Pier and the Empire State Building. A Disney+ series adapted the story from December 2023 to January 2024.
In the 1920s the Osage Nation drew oil wealth from beneath its Oklahoma land, and newspapers called the Osage the richest nation or social group on earth, man for man. Then they began to die — shot, poisoned, killed by a bomb in Fairfax — while local courts and guardians controlled the money.
This route follows the documented places of the Osage murders, from Mollie Kyle's Gray Horse and Pawhuska's Million Dollar Elm to the Fairfax bombing, a lawyer's body beside the railroad, and the trials at Guthrie and Oklahoma City. It ends at the Osage Nation Museum, which keeps the record in the tribe's own voice. Scorsese's 2023 film was shot in many of the same towns.
Wim Wenders' Perfect Days follows Hirayama, a Tokyo toilet cleaner who keeps his days exactly the same: the same overalls, the same cassette tapes, the same sandwich under the trees. The city changes around him; he notices the light through the leaves.
This route follows the film's real Tokyo, from the old apartment east of the Sumida to four of the Tokyo Toilet project's designer facilities, the shrine bench where he eats lunch, the sento and Asakusa bar that fill his evenings, and the bridge where the story ends.
In 1600 an English pilot came ashore in Japan. FX's Shōgun renames the players — John Blackthorne is William Adams, Lord Toranaga is Tokugawa Ieyasu, Lady Mariko is Hosokawa Gracia — and moves the shipwreck from Usuki to the Izu village of Ajiro. This route follows the documented places behind the drama, from the real landing at Usuki and the regents' court at Osaka Castle to the mansion where Gracia died, Adams's shipyard at Itō, his house in Nihonbashi and his grave at Hirado. The 2024 series was filmed in British Columbia.
Where The Last Kingdom is set: Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, Viking York, the Somerset marshes at Athelney and the battlefield at Edington, the real ground of Uhtred's wars. A Saxon boy raised by Danes, he fights for Alfred and against him, and each stop is set against what history records.
The television series adapts Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories; where a stop follows a particular novel or series, the point says so. The show was filmed mainly in Hungary, so the places below are the real settings of the events, not the filming locations.
Gereon Rath arrives from Cologne in 1929 to a Berlin of police headquarters, cabarets and armed conspiracies. The series follows him and Charlotte Ritter from the May Day riots through the fall of the Weimar Republic to Hitler's first weeks in power, mixing real streets with sets and stand-ins.
This route visits the places the story names and the buildings that played them: the Rotes Rathaus as the police headquarters, the real Moka Efti, the Anhalter goods yard, the Hermannplatz U-Bahn, a Duisburg steelworks, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Schloss Drachenburg and the Volksbühne. Some stops are exact; others are stand-ins far from Berlin.
Goblin was filmed in Seoul, on the Jumunjin breakwater on Korea's east coast and in Quebec City, where the red door in Petit-Champlain, the Château Frontenac and the Tourny fountain appear. A Goryeo general killed by his king returns as an immortal goblin and spends 939 years looking for the bride who can pull the sword from his chest.
The route follows the story from the palace set where his Goryeo past was filmed to his house in Seoul, the Gangneung breakwater where they first meet, and the old streets of Quebec City beyond a red door. It ends at the park that stands in for the Yoo family cemetery.
Seong Gi-hun is a divorced gambler in Seoul, broke and in debt. A smiling stranger offers him a game of ddakji on a subway platform, and soon he is playing children's games for his life. The arena is fiction: the games were built as sets at the Daejeon Expo Science Park and later dismantled, and the island exteriors come from Seongapdo, a private island that cannot be visited.
Everything around the arena is real — the market, the corner shop, the amusement park, the airport — and this route follows those places in story order, from a schoolyard in the first episode to a park where the Salesman starts recruiting again.
Russia's best-loved bogatyr was a peasant's son who could not walk until he was 33. Then he set out for Kiev, defended a city, killed a whistling monster in the forest and became the chief hero of Prince Vladimir's court.
The route follows the epic songs known as byliny, from his village near Murom to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, where the relics of a real monk, Ilya Pechersky, are said by some to be the hero's. Legend and history are marked apart: the pins show where tradition puts the story, not proof that it happened.
