In April 1625 an eighteen-year-old Gascon rides into the market town of Meung on a yellow pony, bound for Paris and the King's Musketeers. Dumas's novel follows D'Artagnan from that first quarrel through duels, a secret night in the Louvre, a bet made during a siege and a midnight ending on a river bank.
The route runs from the Loire to Paris, on to La Rochelle and Portsmouth, and back to the banks of the Lys. The streets, squares and palaces are real; most inns, houses and bastions are Dumas's, so several pins mark a town or a street rather than a building.
Ghost of Yōtei follows Atsu, a wandering mercenary who returns to Ezo — modern-day Hokkaido — in 1603 to hunt down the Yōtei Six, the band led by the samurai lord Nariaki Saito who slaughtered her family sixteen years earlier. Her revenge carries her across an island modelled on Hokkaido, from the grasslands at Mount Yōtei's foot to the frozen north and the Matsumae clan's castle in the south.
This route follows the game's regions and their real counterparts: the Yotei Grasslands around Lake Shikotsu, the Ishikari Plain, the Ainu country of the Nayoro Wilds, the Kitsune's Teshio Ridge, and the Tokachi Range, with Mount Yōtei and Matsumae Castle as its fixed points.
In 1581 the African slave Diogo comes to Kyoto with a Jesuit delegation and is handed to the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who renames him Yasuke and makes him a samurai. That year Nobunaga's army crushes the ninja province of Iga, where the young shinobi Naoe loses her father and inherits his Hidden Blade.
From there the two hunt the same conspiracy across Kansai: the port of Sakai, the temple at Honnō-ji where Nobunaga dies, a kofun in Settsu, the castle of Shōryūji at Yamazaki, the shrines of Yamato, and the Templar recruiting ground of Kii. Most stops are real castles, temples and tombs that the game rebuilds.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze comes to Constantinople in 1511, an old Assassin chasing five keys that unlock a library sealed beneath Masyaf by Altaïr two and a half centuries earlier. The keys lie scattered across an Ottoman capital caught between the succession claims of the princes Ahmet and Selim, with Byzantine Templars working against the city; the search runs from the Galata Tower and Hagia Sophia to the palace at Topkapı, out to the Maiden's Tower in the Bosphorus and, at the end, into a stronghold of the Byzantine Templars under Cappadocia.
This route starts at Masyaf in Syria and follows Ezio through the real Istanbul of the game, the tower, church, palace and islet that can still be visited, before ending underground in Cappadocia.
Assassin's Creed III crosses the American Revolution from London's Covent Garden opera house to Boston's Old State House, Bunker Hill and the Battery in Manhattan. In 1754 the Templar Haytham Kenway carries a stolen key to the colonies; his son Connor becomes the Assassin who hunts him through the war.
Assassin's Creed III builds its America from real maps, and almost every stop can still be walked: the opera house in Covent Garden, the Old State House and Boston Harbor, the green at Lexington and the bridge at Concord, the Bunker Hill battlefield, the Valley Forge encampment, the Monmouth battlefield, and the Battery at the foot of Manhattan, where the war ends.
Watch Dogs 2 recreates the Bay Area: San Francisco, Oakland, Marin County and Silicon Valley, from Coit Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz and a parody of the Googleplex, where the hacker Marcus Holloway and his crew DedSec set out to bring down the Blume corporation's surveillance network.
This route follows the places where the story's operations happen, from Coit Tower and Embarcadero Center to Sutro Tower, the Googleplex, Ubisoft's own studio, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.
L.A. Noire rebuilds Los Angeles in 1947 with fanatical care: the studio mapped the real streets, modelled building interiors on the originals, and filled the map with the city's landmarks. Detective Cole Phelps drives that recreation through traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases, and much of the city he moves through is still standing.
This tour follows the real places behind the game's map, from Union Station and Bunker Hill to Wilshire's art deco and the Hollywood movie palaces, then down to the river where the story ends. Every pin marks a real site the game put on its streets.
Stranger Things' Hawkins, Indiana, is really small-town Georgia: the town square in Jackson, a shuttered psychiatric hospital near Atlanta, a dead shopping mall in Duluth. The stand-ins also include a mansion in Rome and a Vilnius prison playing Kamchatka; in the story, a boy vanishes and a girl walks out of the woods.
This route follows the real stand-ins, from the laboratory where the story begins to the quarry, the school, the Starcourt Mall, the mansion that became the Creel House, and the Vilnius prison that stood in for Kamchatka.
Emily, a young marketing executive, is posted to Paris to give a French agency a social-media voice, and the show follows her across the city: the little square where she lives, her office by the Palais-Royal, a Left Bank café and the gardens and monuments she drifts through. In its fourth season the story reaches Rome, where Marcello shows her the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain.
This route gathers the places that define Emily's Paris, from the Place de l'Estrapade — where her apartment faces Gabriel's restaurant across the square — to the Café de Flore, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Palais Garnier, Montmartre's Sacré-Cœur and the French Open at Stade Roland Garros. It ends in Rome, at the two sights that seal her move to Italy.
A CIA officer called the Protagonist joins Tenet, a secret organisation fighting a war across time. Inverted bullets and a Russian oligarch named Sator pull him from a Kyiv opera house to Mumbai, Oslo, the Amalfi Coast and Tallinn, chasing a device sent back from the future.
This route follows the film's real locations: Tallinn's Linnahall standing in for the Kyiv opera house, Colaba in Mumbai, the Oslo freeport sequence, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone above Amalfi, the Tallinn streets of the car chase and the California ghost town used for Stalsk-12. The Oslo Freeport and Stalsk-12 are fictional, so their pins mark the real places the film points to.
Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy.
The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.
J. Robert Oppenheimer studies in Cambridge and Göttingen, builds a physics school at Berkeley, and is handed the one job nobody else wants: build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) follows him from the Cavendish Laboratory to a secret mesa in New Mexico, through the Trinity test and the political fallout that ends his career.
This route follows the film's real places — Cambridge, Göttingen, LeConte Hall, Los Alamos, Trinity, the White House, the Institute for Advanced Study and the room where his security clearance was revoked. The film's own stand-ins, from Ghost Ranch to Kerckhoff Hall, Belen and Alhambra, are noted at each stop.
In 1984 Ghostbusters turned real New York addresses into a haunted city: the New York Public Library's marble reading room, the Hook & Ladder 8 firehouse in Tribeca and 55 Central Park West, the apartment block that becomes Spook Central. The Sedgewick Hotel was filmed at the Millennium Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles.
Most of the exterior landmarks survive and can be visited, though the Sedgewick Hotel's interiors were filmed on the other side of the country, at a grand downtown Los Angeles hotel. This route follows the film's story from the first library ghost to the rooftop battle with Gozer.
Hill Valley is fictional, but almost all of it is Los Angeles. The 1985 film sends Marty McFly thirty years back to a small California town, and the filmmakers built its square on a studio backlot and dressed real malls, schools, churches and houses around the city as Hill Valley. This route follows the story from the Twin Pines Mall car park in City of Industry through 1955 and back to the McFly home in Arleta.
Each stop is a real place that played a piece of Hill Valley; the private homes are seen from the street only.
A feather drifts down onto a bench in Savannah, and a man starts to talk. His life unrolls across half a century of American history, from an Alabama childhood to the jungles of Vietnam, the Lincoln Memorial, the Watergate and a bayou shrimp boat.
This route follows the film in order, from the bench on Chippewa Square to the lighthouse in Maine and the desert where the running finally stops. It marks the real locations and the real stand-ins, since the fictional town of Greenbow and the Vietnam jungle were both played by South Carolina.
A shy waitress at a Montmartre café staffed and frequented by eccentrics finds a metal box of childhood memorabilia hidden behind a bathroom tile and gets drawn into the lives around her: practical jokes on the nasty greengrocer Collignon, street scenes described aloud to a blind man, and a dropped photo album belonging to Nino, a collector of discarded photo-booth pictures.
The route follows her Paris from the café on Rue Lepic to the photo booths of the Gare de l'Est and the blue arrows on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur, taking in skipping stones on the Canal Saint-Martin and a surge of love on the Pont des Arts along the way. Nearly every stop is a real place you can visit.
Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes".
This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.
December 1499: Cesare Borgia's army has struck the Auditore villa at Monteriggioni, killing Mario and seizing the Apple of Eden. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood sends Ezio to Rome, the center of Templar power, to take the fight to the Borgia-led Templars, and the hunt for the Apple runs from St Peter's Basilica to a temple hidden underneath the Colosseum.
This route follows Ezio from the villa at Monteriggioni through Borgia Rome — the Castel Sant'Angelo fortress, the Pantheon, St Peter's and the Colosseum — to Viana in Navarre, Spain, where his fight with Cesare ends on the battlements. Every stop is a real place you can visit.
In 1868, at the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution, twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye come to a London controlled by the Templars under Crawford Starrick, and set out to take the city back: building their street gang, the Rooks, across an open world of seven Victorian boroughs. Jacob works through Starrick's lieutenants while Evie hunts a Piece of Eden, the Shroud, from St Paul's to the Tower to a vault under Buckingham Palace.
This route follows both threads across the capital, then jumps forward: to Whitechapel in 1888, where Evie hunts Jack the Ripper in the expansion, and to Tower Bridge in 1916, where Jacob's granddaughter Lydia clears a German spy nest at Churchill's request. Every stop is a real building or district you can walk to.
Vice City is Miami with the labels peeled off. The 2002 game, set in 1986, follows gangster Tommy Vercetti's rise to power after prison, from an ambushed drug deal to the takeover of a drug lord's mansion. The developers built the world from extensive field research in Miami, and the plot draws on the city's real Cubans, Haitians and biker gangs.
This route pins six real places behind the fiction: the port of the opening ambush, the Ocean Drive strip behind Ocean Beach, Little Havana and Little Haiti with their warring gangs, Downtown's biker ground, and the private island behind the Starfish Island mansion. Every pin marks the real stand-in, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. One caveat: Vice City itself is fictional, so expect the flavour of 1980s Miami rather than a street-by-street copy.
A famous American actress walks into a Notting Hill travel bookshop, and its shy owner falls for her: that is the whole of Notting Hill, and somehow it is enough. Hugh Grant stammers, Julia Roberts glows, and London plays itself, from the market street of Portobello Road to a midnight garden and a press conference at the Savoy.
The route follows the film in story order, from the bookshop at 142 Portobello Road and the blue door at 280 Westbourne Park Road to the Ritz, a birthday party, the private garden, the Henry James set at Kenwood House and the Savoy finale. The flat interiors were studio sets and the garden is private, so some pins are for looking rather than entering.
Mamma Mia! sets fictional Kalokairi on Skopelos and Skiathos: the town below Villa Donna, the Old Port, Glysteri's rock jump and the wedding chapel of Agios Ioannis Prodromos. Sophie has secretly invited three possible fathers to her wedding.
Five stops on the real islands behind Kalokairi, where principal photography took place from August to September 2007: the town below the villa's hill, the Skiathos harbour where two of the men arrive in identical cabs, the cove of the diary reading and the rock jump, the main beach set with its vanished bar and jetty, and the rock-top chapel of the wedding. One caveat: there is no Villa Donna to visit — the hotel was a Pinewood set.
Where Gladiator was filmed: the Germania battle in a Surrey wood near Farnham, Maximus' farm in Tuscany's Val d'Orcia, the slave market at Ait Ben Haddou in Morocco and Rome's Colosseum rebuilt on Malta's Fort Ricasoli. In 180 AD the general Maximus refuses his loyalty to the new emperor Commodus, loses everything and fights his way back as a gladiator.
The route follows the shoot between January and May 1999: the Surrey wood where the Germania battle burned, the Val d'Orcia valley of Maximus' farm, the Moroccan ksar that played Zuccabar and the one-third Colosseum replica built on Malta's Fort Ricasoli — ending at the real Colosseum, where the story's final duel is set.
Inception filmed the folding bridge sequence on Paris's Bir-Hakeim bridge, used Tangier standing in for Mombasa, and shot in downtown Los Angeles and at Alberta's temporarily closed Fortress Mountain ski resort. Dom Cobb recruits a forger, a chemist and an architecture student to implant an idea and leads them down through layered dreams to an alpine fortress.
This route follows the 2009 shoot across four countries: the Paris bridge that folds, a fictional bistro corner, Tangier standing in for Mombasa, two Los Angeles action sites and the closed Alberta ski resort that became the snow fortress. Two stops look different today: the bistro was a temporary set and the Heim Bridge has been replaced.
