Agatha Christie's 1937 mystery puts Hercule Poirot on holiday in Aswan, waiting to board the Nile steamer Karnak. Among his fellow passengers are a jilted woman stalking her ex-fiancé's honeymoon, her former friend the heiress, and a boulder that comes uncomfortably close to the bride.
The route follows the steamer from Aswan to Wadi Halfa and ends at Karnak, where the 1978 film moves the falling stone. The novel itself puts that scene at Abu Simbel.
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.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One sends Ethan Hunt across the Empty Quarter, Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice for a two-piece key, with a cliff jump at Hellesylt and a train sequence doubled on a Yorkshire railway and in a Peak District quarry. The rogue AI Entity wants it too.
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.
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.
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.
Gotham is Chicago. The film shot most of Batman's city on real streets and buildings in the Loop, dressing them up as Gotham, then flew the crew to Hong Kong for its one overseas detour. This route follows The Dark Knight in order, from the bank heist that opens it to the rooftop where Batman and the Joker have their last fight.
Along the way: the disused post office that doubled as a bank, the glass office where Wayne holds a fundraiser, the financial street of the convoy chase, the hospital the Joker destroys, an old Chicago bar, the pier where two ferries wait, and Hong Kong's International Finance Centre.
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.
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.
The Galar region is Britain played back as a game: a fictional land inspired by the United Kingdom, dotted with landmarks that recall Bath and York, crowned by a London of clock towers and football-stadium gyms. Eight gym cities, eight badges, and then the Champion's Cup in Wyndon, where Leon waits and the Darkest Day breaks.
This route walks the real Britain behind that map, south to north and then beyond: a chalk giant, a lighthouse, Roman baths, a minster, a national stadium and a clock tower, plus the two downloadable lands, the Isle of Man and the snows of Scotland. Every identification is a fan or developer reading, never confirmed in the games, so every pin here is speculative.
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.
The second season of The White Lotus moves to a luxury resort in Sicily, following the staff and wealthy guests through a week of sightseeing days, villa parties and opera nights. Guests explore Taormina's Greek theatre, Daphne drags Harper down to Baroque Noto, and Tanya falls in with a wealthy Brit whose Palermo villa hides an ugly twist.
This route visits the real filming locations in episode order, from the San Domenico Palace hotel to the island beach of the finale. The show swaps two villas across the island: its Noto palace is really Villa Tasca outside Palermo, and Quentin's Palermo villa is Villa Elena near Noto.
The BBC's Sherlock Holmes and his flatmate, army doctor John Watson, solve crimes in present-day London, from a killer's phone traced to their own doorstep to a dominatrix with compromising photographs and a criminal who cracks the Crown Jewels from his mobile. Six stops follow the first three series in order: the 221B front door on North Gower Street, the Baker Street museum, a summons to Buckingham Palace, Moriarty's Tower heist, the hospital rooftop finale and a bomb under Parliament.
Most stops are London landmarks you can see from the street; the 221B door is a private house, and the palace, Tower, hospital and Parliament appear as the show's story settings.
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.
Dune turns real places into its planets: Norway's Stadlandet is Caladan, Jordan's Wadi Rum and Abu Dhabi's Liwa Oasis share Arrakis, Budapest's Origo Studios build Arrakeen and Italy's Brion tomb becomes the emperor's court. Paul Atreides leaves Caladan for the desert planet, the sole source of spice, then forces Emperor Shaddam to come to Arrakis with Irulan and his Sardaukar soldiers.
This route links the five key locations: Stadlandet standing in for Caladan, Wadi Rum and the Liwa Oasis sharing Arrakis, Origo Studios staging Arrakeen and the ornithopters, and the Brion tomb doubling as the imperial court. Part One shot from March to July 2019 in Hungary, Jordan, Norway and the Emirates; Part Two followed from July to December 2022, adding Italy and Namibia to the itinerary.
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.
