Chainsaw Man is a late-1990s Tokyo where devils are real, and the anime's model streets run from Nerima Station to the phone booth and stairs of Kanda in the Reze Arc film. Denji, a teenage Devil Hunter, joins the government's Public Safety Division under Makima, and the 12-episode first season (2022) sends him and Power through Nerima. The 2025 film moves the story to Kanda: Denji meets Reze, a Bomb Devil hybrid, beside a Jinbocho phone booth, and she works at a café in Sarugakuchō.
This route follows the documented model spots in story order, from Nerima Station and a footbridge in the season finale to the phone booth, the Aoi Building, the Onnazaka stairs and the café fans call Futamichi. Most are working streets and businesses; visit quietly.
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai is set in Fujisawa and Kamakura on the Kanagawa coast, and its story runs through real places: the Fujisawa library where Sakuta first sees Mai in a bunny suit, the Enoden line to Shichirigahama, the beach where he meets Shoko, the shrine on Enoshima and the aquarium on Katase Beach.
The route follows the first television series from the library and Fujisawa Station to Goshogaya Park, Shichirigahama and Enoshima. Mai, Tomoe and Shoko each have a scene here, and most of the stops are ordinary public places that still look much as they do in the anime.
GTA: San Andreas turns California and Nevada into one state: Los Santos is Los Angeles, San Fierro is San Francisco, Las Venturas is Las Vegas. The 2004 game follows CJ from Grove Street to stand-ins for the Golden Gate, Hoover Dam and the Las Vegas Strip.
This route visits seven real stand-ins behind the game, from Compton and the Hollywood Sign to Mount Diablo, the Golden Gate Bridge, Area 51, Hoover Dam and the Las Vegas Strip. Every pin marks the real place, and each stop names the in-game location it doubles for. Expect city traffic, desert heat and long drives between stops.
Fallout 3 is set in the ruins of Washington, D.C., and its Capital Wasteland includes the Washington Monument, the National Mall, the National Archives and the Jefferson Memorial as places the player can explore. Bethesda's 2008 role-playing game takes place in 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war, and sends the Lone Wanderer across the real city and its Metro.
This route follows the main story from the first view of the Washington Monument to the Brotherhood's march on the Jefferson Memorial, taking in the Mall's trenches, the White House crater and the Archives' robot guardian. Raven Rock, the real Cold War bunker in Pennsylvania, is the Enclave's base, and the Broken Steel add-on ends the route at the Citadel inside the Pentagon.
Little House in the Big Woods begins in a log cabin near Pepin, Wisconsin, and the Ingalls family goes on to a Kansas prairie, a dugout beside Plum Creek at Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and the Dakota homestead at De Smet. All five homesites survive as cabins, museums or marked sites.
The route follows the books in order: the Wisconsin woods of the early 1870s, the Kansas cabin of 1869–1870, the locust-struck dugout of 1874, the surveyors' house and homestead at De Smet, and finally Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the first four books in the Rock House at 65.
Halloween's Haddonfield is South Pasadena and Hollywood, from the Myers house on Mission Street to the Doyle house on Orange Grove Avenue. John Carpenter shot the 1978 film in 20 days that May, using a quiet Los Angeles suburb, a Sierra Madre cemetery and two houses on a Hollywood block with few palm trees to stand in for Illinois.
This route follows Michael Myers from the 1963 murder in his childhood home to the stolen mask at Nichol's Hardware, the school day, the first sighting at the hedge and the babysitting night in Hollywood. The Myers house has moved since filming; the route says where it stands now.
Natsume's Book of Friends is set in an unnamed country town, but many of its scenes are modelled on Hitoyoshi in Kumamoto, the author's hometown, with Hitoyoshi Station, Okadome Kofuku Station and Ichifusa Dam all shown in the anime.
This route follows the rails and hills of the Hitoyoshi-Kuma region and ends with one detour to Fukuoka. The series gives no street addresses, so most pins mark the area, not a single scene.
Friday the 13th (1980) was filmed at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Hardwick, New Jersey, with Blairstown's Main Street, the Moravian Cemetery in Hope and the Blairstown Diner standing in for the town and countryside around Camp Crystal Lake.
The film was shot in and around Hardwick, Blairstown and Hope in autumn 1979, mostly at a working Boy Scout camp on Sand Pond. This route follows Annie's hitchhike into town, the counselors' night at camp, Steve Christy's evening at the diner and Alice's final struggle on the lakeshore.
Zhmurki (Dead Man's Bluff, 2005) is set in 1990s Nizhny Novgorod, and Aleksei Balabanov filmed it there: in the Kovalikhinsky Baths, at Vodnik Stadium, by the Church of Elijah and in the Sirotkin House.
This route follows seven locations of Balabanov's black comedy about bandits of the 1990s, from the bathhouse that played a morgue to the house of the final showdown. Several stops have changed since the shoot, and one is closed to visitors.
The Walking Dead was filmed across Georgia, with downtown Atlanta, Bellwood Quarry, the Cobb Energy Centre and Senoia standing in for its apocalyptic sets.
This route follows the show from Rick's first ride into Atlanta, through the survivors' camp at the quarry and the CDC, then south to the town that became Woodbury and to Rick's home town, and on to Alexandria and the Kingdom. Most of the stops are on public streets or in public parks; the two studio-lot stops sit on private land.
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.
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.
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.
Home Alone's Kevin McCallister lives at a real three-storey house at 671 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois; his family's Christmas dash was filmed at Chicago's O'Hare, and Home Alone 2 sends him to the Plaza Hotel, Central Park and the Rockefeller Center tree.
The route follows both films in order, from the Winnetka house and the two churches where Kevin meets Old Man Marley to the Chicago buildings that stood in for Duncan's Toy Chest and the New York landmarks of the sequel. Every stop is a documented filming location; the house is a private home, so visitors should not disturb the residents.
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.
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.
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.
Sean Devlin, an Irish race car driver, joins the French Resistance after the Nazis murder his best friend and turn occupied Paris black and white. Pandemic Studios' 2009 open-world game sends him across the city's landmarks on a campaign of sabotage and revenge, hunting the SS commander Kurt Dierker.
The five stops follow the landmarks the story uses, from the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées to Notre-Dame, the Catacombs and the Eiffel Tower. Each carries the real occupation history of the site between 1940 and 1944, and what a visitor finds there today.
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.
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.