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.
In 1754 a British gentleman, Haytham Kenway, kills a man at the opera in London and carries a stolen key to the American colonies. He is a Templar. His son, Connor, grows up to become the Assassin who hunts him across the American Revolution — through the Boston Massacre and the tea ships, the first shots at Lexington, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, Monmouth and finally New York.
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.
In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt races a rogue artificial intelligence called the Entity for a two-piece key that can control it. The chase crosses the Empty Quarter, Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice before a night train runs into the Alps and a bridge is blown.
Almost every stop is a real place: the desert and airport in the Emirates, a car chase through Rome, a party at the Doge's Palace, a cliff jump at Hellesylt in Norway, and the Alpine train sequence doubled on a Yorkshire heritage railway and in a Peak District quarry.
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.
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.
Kalos is Metropolitan France turned into a star-shaped Pokémon region. Lumiose City is inspired by Paris, its Prism Tower by the Eiffel Tower and its art museum by the Louvre; the Battle Château recalls Chenonceau on the Loire, the palais Chaydeuvre is the château de Versailles, and the stones outside Geosenge Town are the Carnac stones. The games never confirm their models — these are fan and encyclopaedia identifications — so every pin on this route is speculative.
The route follows the story across the real France behind Kalos: the town where the adventure begins, Lumiose's iron tower, two châteaux and a royal palace, a coastal aquarium, the island tower where Mega Evolution is learned, the cathedral clock behind Anistar's sundial, the Breton megalith field where Team Flare hides its ultimate weapon, and an abandoned mine where the legendary Zygarde sleeps.
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.
In 180 AD the Roman general Maximus leads the Roman army to victory against Germanic tribes, then refuses his loyalty to the new emperor and loses everything: his wife and son are murdered, and slave traders sell him to a gladiator trainer. Proximo takes him to fight in Rome's Colosseum, where he overpowers and kills Commodus in a final duel.
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.
Tommy sets out for Seattle to hunt Abby, and Ellie and Dina follow him into a ruined city where the WLF militia and a cult, the Seraphites, fight for control. The Last of Us Part II plays the same three days twice: first as Ellie, then as Abby. The city is the real one: Naughty Dog chose Seattle for its hills and varied weather, and its artists travelled there to study the architecture, vegetation and topography.
This route follows both runs. Ellie's: the synagogue they call the Dome, the Pinnacle Theatre, the convention centre and its stalkers, the hospital and the aquarium. Abby's: the stadium she lives in, the Great Wheel of her memories, the Chinatown Gate and the Space Needle seen from the island. Many of the game's buildings carry new names; each stop names the real one behind it.
In 1715 a Welsh pirate kills an Assassin, steals his clothes and his name, and ends up sitting in his place at a meeting of Templars in Havana. That is how Edward Kenway enters the Golden Age of Piracy: he takes a ship, the Jackdaw, builds a pirate brotherhood in Nassau, loses his friends to the gallows and to each other, and spends the rest of the story chasing a device called the Observatory that can watch anyone on earth.
Black Flag sets all of it in real ports — Havana, Nassau, Kingston, Port Royal — and then leaves the Caribbean for the Maya ruins of Tulum, an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a final scene in London. The route follows Edward from the harbour where Torres's plot starts, through the pirate republic and the governor who ends it, to the Kingston house where Mary Read drops the disguise, the jail at Port Royal, Príncipe, where the Sage is waiting, and Covent Garden. Most stops mark a real landmark in the town the game rebuilds.
Liberty City is New York with the labels peeled off. Grand Theft Auto IV rebuilds four of the boroughs, borrows New Jersey for the state across the river, and copies in the Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island Cyclone, the Manhattan Bridge, Times Square and the Empire State Building — then renames nearly all of them, so the game's Liberty statue holds a takeaway coffee instead of a torch. The story is set in 2008, the year the game arrived.
This route pins nine real places behind those names: the triumphal arch at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, the wooden Cyclone at Coney Island, the Manhattan Bridge as the Algonquin Bridge, Brighton Beach as Hove Beach, the surviving 1964 World's Fair site in Queens, and three Manhattan landmarks — Middle Park, Star Junction and the Rotterdam Tower. Each stop names the in-game location it stands in for. One caveat: Rockstar deliberately avoided a precise recreation of New York, so expect the landmarks, not the street plan.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sends Indy from a Boy Scout outing in the Utah desert to the rock-cut façade of Petra, chasing the Holy Grail and his missing father. Three trials guard the cup at the end. The film borrows its scenery from half of Europe, the Middle East and the American West.
Nine stops, most of them still standing: the Arches canyons of the opening, the church façade in Venice's Campo San Barnaba that plays the library, an Eifel castle dressed as Brunwald, a San Francisco building that played Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the Almería beach where Henry brings down a fighter with an umbrella, a Granada station playing Alexandretta, the Tabernas tank chase, the Treasury that fronts the Grail's temple, and the Texas sunset the film ends on. Dates are story time; filming ran from May 1988 to early 1989.
The journey south ran through Morocco first. For the third season the Atlantic ramparts of Essaouira stood in for Astapor, the slaver city where Daenerys buys an army of eunuch soldiers, and the earthen ksar of Aït Benhaddou stood in for Yunkai, whose two hundred thousand slaves she promises to free. When the story turned to Dorne, Spain answered: the Alcázar of Seville became the Water Gardens of House Martell, and the bullring at Osuna the fighting pits of Meereen.
Six stops in the order the episodes aired — two in Morocco, four in Spain. The last two are the biggest set-pieces of the sixth and seventh seasons: Girona's cathedral and steps as the Sept of Baelor, and the Roman ruins at Itálica as the ruined Dragonpit.
Much of Game of Thrones' North was filmed in Northern Ireland. Winterfell, its godswood, Castle Black, the Kingsroad and a fishing harbour that played Pyke were all real ground dressed as Westeros, and a basalt hillside above a small Antrim village hosts the first execution of the series.
The route runs in the order the episodes aired: the deserter's beheading above Cairncastle and the Winterfell of Castle Ward, then the quarry that held Castle Black and the Wall, the godswood, the Kingsroad beech avenue and the harbour where Theon Greyjoy comes home. The last stop is the Moneyglass estate, where a bigger Winterfell was built for the second season and used again for the eighth season's battle. Almost everything here is exterior: Winterfell's great hall was a soundstage set.
Just after midnight on 6 June 1944, gliders landed beside a canal bridge at Bénouville, and by mid-morning Allied troops were ashore on five code-named beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword — along the Normandy coast. This route visits the places where that day was won and lost, and what stands there today.
It starts with the glider coup de main at Pegasus Bridge, then runs along the coast from west to east: the museum built on the sand at Utah, the Rangers' climb at Pointe du Hoc, the American cemetery above Omaha, the concrete of the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches, the Canadian centre behind Juno and the Grand Bunker above Sword.
Belfast built her, Southampton sailed her, and two tender ports filled her up before the Atlantic took her. This route follows the whole last leg of Titanic's maiden voyage in order — from the Belfast slipway where 100,000 people watched her leave the ways to the Halifax cemetery where 121 of her dead are buried.
Six stops: the shipyard that became a museum, the Southampton quayside and its memorial to the engineers who stayed at their posts, the two Channel ports where tenders ferried passengers out to a ship too big to come alongside, the wreck on the seabed at 12,500 feet, and the graves at Fairview Lawn. Only the wreck is out of reach; every other stop can be walked today.
A jazz pianist and an aspiring actress argue through the windows of their cars in a Los Angeles traffic jam, and the city itself becomes the romance: a night on a funicular, a broken projector, a kiss in a planetarium. Damien Chazelle shot La La Land in 40 days across Los Angeles in the summer of 2015, and most of the places the couple reaches for are still there.
This route follows Mia and Sebastian from the freeway ramps where they shout at each other to the jazz bar Seb finally gets to open — the 105/110 connector ramps, the Burbank café on the Warner lot, the Lighthouse Café and the pier beside it, the Rialto in South Pasadena, Griffith Observatory and Angels Flight. The film rarely names its own locations, so a few pins mark the real building that stood in for the one on screen.
A student framed for an assault is put on probation, moves into a Tokyo neighbourhood that does not exist, and ends the school year as one of the Phantom Thieves. Persona 5 is set in modern-day Tokyo and uses real districts — Sangenjaya, Shibuya, Shinjuku and Akihabara — as its map, alongside the Metaverse where the Thieves enter Palaces.
This route picks five stops out of that year: Sojiro's Café Leblanc above Sangen-jaya Station, the Shibuya counter where the Thieves buy their equipment, Shinjuku's bar street and a fortune-teller's stand, the Akihabara arcade where a schoolboy holds a high score, and Odaiba, where the palace of Persona 5 Royal rises. Leblanc, the Crossroads Bar and the Gigolo Arcade are invented; the neighbourhoods around them are not.
Crown Princess Ann, on a goodwill tour of Rome, slips out of her embassy for one night of ordinary life. Reporter Joe Bradley finds her asleep in the street, recognises her from a newspaper photograph, and secretly guides her through the city to land an exclusive — a day of ice cream, a Vespa and the Mouth of Truth that turns into something neither of them planned.
William Wyler's 1953 comedy was shot almost entirely in Rome. The route follows Ann and Joe through the real locations: the palace that played the embassy, Joe's flat on Via Margutta, the Trevi and the barber by the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, the Bocca della Verità, the riverside dance beside Castel Sant'Angelo and the closing press conference at Palazzo Colonna.
Insomniac's Spider-Man games hand you a fictionalized modern-day New York and tell you to swing it. The first game maps Manhattan, from a sorcerer's doorstep in Greenwich Village to the square where a virus breaks out; the sequel adds Brooklyn and Queens, where Peter comes home to his late aunt's house and takes his friends to the amusements.
This tour follows that arc in seven stops: a fictional mansion, three skyscrapers, an outbreak square, a Queens street and a Brooklyn funfair. Every pin marks the real place behind the mission, and almost all of them can be visited on one long subway day.
A smuggler named Joel is hired to carry fourteen-year-old Ellie — possibly immune to the fungus that ended the world — across a ruined America, from the Boston quarantine zone to a hospital in Salt Lake City. What starts as a delivery job becomes the closest thing either of them has left to family, ending in a hospital corridor with an impossible choice.
This route follows their road west in story order: outbreak night in Austin, the Boston handoff, Bill's trapped town, the Pittsburgh ambush, Tommy's dam settlement at Jackson, the deserted university in Colorado and the Salt Lake City hospital. The cities are real but the story sites are placed approximately, with real landmarks as pins.
