The Declaration of Independence was debated, written and adopted in a few streets of Old City Philadelphia: City Tavern, Carpenters' Hall, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell are all within a short walk.
The route runs from the tavern meeting of May 1774 and the First Continental Congress, through Jefferson's drafting in June 1776, to the vote of 2 July, the adoption on 4 July and the public reading on 8 July. The Liberty Bell's famous ringing is more legend than record.
Office Romance (1977) is set in Moscow, and its statistical office is assembled from three places: the Petrovka 3/6 facade, Mosfilm studio sets and a rooftop in Bolshoy Gnezdnikovsky Lane.
Eldar Ryazanov's comedy follows a shy statistician and his stern boss, with a city chosen carefully to show who lives where.
This route visits the film's real locations, the studio where the office was built, and the homes and station that give each character a place in Moscow.
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.
Jaws was filmed on Martha's Vineyard, which stood in for Amity Island: Edgartown, State Beach and the Jaws Bridge.
Steven Spielberg began shooting there on 2 May 1974, using the island's whaling town, its barrier beaches and the little Chappaquiddick ferry as the summer resort the shark terrorises. This route follows the film from the opening bonfire at South Beach to the last shot off Cape Poge Light. In between are Brody's beach-closing signs at Water and Main, the Kintner attack at Joseph Sylvia State Beach, the shark's run under the American Legion Memorial Bridge into Sengekontacket Pond, Quint's vanished workshop at Menemsha and the open water between Oak Bluffs and East Chop where the Orca hunts.
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.
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.
In September 1978, an 18-year-old photographer named Reza Shirazi comes home to Tehran and is pulled into the last days before Black Friday. The developers built the game from interviews with forty Iranians who lived through the revolution and from photographs by Michel Setboun; the streets, the cinema hideout and the prison are real places, filled with a fictional cast.
This route follows the game's 1978 story in order, from a Hasanabad rooftop to the shooting at Jaleh Square, then ends in the Evin Prison interrogation that frames the whole game. It is a route through the city the game recreates, not a walking itinerary.
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.
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.
Akito wakes after a traffic crash in a Shibuya emptied by a masked occultist's fog, sharing his body with the spirit KK and able to see the Marebito that now fill the streets. Tango Gameworks built the district as a condensed, walkable stage rather than a straight copy, keeping landmarks, borrowing back streets and folding in a few districts from elsewhere in Tokyo.
The route follows the game from the scramble crossing and the station through Center Gai, Dōgenzaka and the 109 stand-in, then north to a borrowed Yanaka Ginza and across town to the Tokyo Tower finale. Pins mark the real places; the game's map moves some of them closer together.
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.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided opens in a half-built Dubai hotel, moves to a near-future Prague, and ends at a London summit. The game's city is a fiction: Prague is compressed into three invented districts, while Dubai's hotel and London's Apex Centre do not exist. But each stop stands on a real place, and this route follows the story from Dubai to the Vltava and the Thames, using the real cities, the real model for Golem City and the real Alpine range as anchors.
The six stops follow the main mission order, from the Dubai prologue through Prague, Golem City and the Swiss Alps to the London finale.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth sends Ichiban Kasuga to Honolulu. The developers rebuilt a compressed stretch of the city, from the sand of Aloha Beach to the markets of Chinatown, mixing real streets, shops and landmarks with renamed and invented ones.
This route follows that Honolulu from Waikiki into downtown: Waikiki Beach, the International Market Place, the Ala Wai Canal bridge, Ala Moana Center, Iolani Palace and Chinatown. Names and distances have changed — Anaconda Shopping Center stands in for Ala Moana, Aloha Beach for Waikiki — but most of the streets and buildings are recognisable. It is a tour of a real city as a game remembers it.
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.
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.
The Banshees of Inisherin's island is fictional, but the film was shot on two real ones: Inishmore, where Pádraic's cottage and the cliffs stand in for it, and Achill, where the pub, the shop, the lake and Colm's house were found. In April 1923, Colm stops speaking to his oldest friend, Pádraic.
This route follows the film's story from Pádraic's cottage to Colm's beach. Because Inisherin does not exist, every pin marks a real filming location; the sets at Cloughmore and Purteen are gone, and Colm's cottage is a private home to be seen from outside.
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.
