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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sleeping Dogs sends an undercover cop into the Sun On Yee triad across a compact Hong Kong built from four real Island districts. The designers photographed the city for a week and then bent it to fit the story.
This route visits the four districts in turn, starting with Aberdeen, where the story opens. Pins mark whole districts, not mission sites: no source ties a specific mission to a street.
Ragnar Lothbrok goes from farmer to king in History's Vikings, a series that sprints through more than a century of Viking Age history and the sagas. This route follows the places of its events in story order, setting what the show does against what history and the sagas say. The series itself was filmed in Ireland.
From a raid on Lindisfarne to Paris under siege, a snake pit near York, a Mediterranean raid, a colony in Iceland and a court in Kiev and a voyage west, with the fictional village of Kattegat left unpinned.
