Hoenn is a world of volcanoes, islands and sea routes, and the games' own region is based on Kyushu, the south-western main island of Japan. Fans and reference writers have matched its towns and landmarks to real places across the island and the seas around it.
This route follows the story from Littleroot Town to the Sealed Chamber and sets each stop beside the place it is said to resemble. The region is inspired by Kyushu, not copied from it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
In 1819 Bolívar led an army from the flooded Llanos over the Páramo de Pisba, a pass 3,960 metres high that had been left unguarded because it seemed impassable. Weeks later he won at Boyacá and entered Santa Fe.
The route follows him from the Congress of Angostura through the freezing crossing, the standoff at Gámeza and the lancers' charge at Vargas Swamp to the Boyacá bridge and the capital. Several stops are approximate, since the sources name regions rather than exact spots.
Twenty years after a nuclear war, the survivors of Moscow live in the Metro, and a young man named Artyom must carry a warning from his home station across the whole network. The novel and the game built on it use real station names, so you can follow Artyom's trip on an ordinary city map.
The route runs from VDNKh in the north through Kitay-gorod, Paveletskaya and Kievskaya to the Ostankino Tower. The book and the game differ in places; where they do, the text says so. The library stop is a likely match, not a named place.
Grigory Pechorin, bored and brilliant, drifts through the Caucasus leaving damage behind him: a smuggler's hut at Taman, the spa season at Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, and a duel on a cliff ledge. Lermontov wrote five linked tales and was himself killed in a duel at Pyatigorsk in 1841.
The route follows the book's order, from a snowy pass and a seaport to the spring, the harp pavilion and the rock gate where Pechorin plays his games, ending on Mashuk where the author met his own fate. Some pins mark real places that only stand in for the novel's.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan and did not come home for 24 years. Years later, in a Genoese prison, he dictated what he had seen to a fellow inmate, and The Travels of Marco Polo was the result.
The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.
You start in a quiet town, pick a starter, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket. The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is invented, yet it is based on the real Kantō region of Japan, and fans have spent decades matching its towns to real places.
This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
A shy waitress at a Montmartre café staffed and frequented by eccentrics finds a metal box of childhood memorabilia hidden behind a bathroom tile and gets drawn into the lives around her: practical jokes on the nasty greengrocer Collignon, street scenes described aloud to a blind man, and a dropped photo album belonging to Nino, a collector of discarded photo-booth pictures.
The route follows her Paris from the café on Rue Lepic to the photo booths of the Gare de l'Est and the blue arrows on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur, taking in skipping stones on the Canal Saint-Martin and a surge of love on the Pont des Arts along the way. Nearly every stop is a real place you can visit.
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.
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.
The year is 2281, two centuries after a nuclear war. A courier carrying a mysterious platinum poker chip to New Vegas is shot in the head and left in a shallow grave — and survives. Obsidian's 2010 role-playing game follows the courier's hunt for the man who did it, into a war for the Mojave between the New California Republic, Caesar's slaver Legion and Mr. House, the hidden ruler of the Strip.
The designers built the map from US Geological Survey data and photographs of the real desert, so the game's road south from Goodsprings and back up to Las Vegas runs through real towns. The route follows that road. The towns' massacres, radiation and battles are fiction; their saloons, roller coasters and dam are not.
In 1970s Kabul, Amir, the son of a rich merchant, and Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant, grow up as near-brothers and fly fighting kites together. In the winter of 1975 Amir wins the city's kite tournament — and fails Hassan at the moment Hassan needs him most. War sends Amir into exile in California; a phone call from Peshawar a quarter of a century later sends him back into Taliban Kabul to make amends.
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 debut follows real places in Afghanistan, Pakistan and California. Homes and alleys in the story are not identified, so those pins mark neighbourhoods; the route offers no travel advice for Afghanistan or Peshawar.
Before the Minotaur, there was the road. Theseus grew up in Troezen, never knowing his father; when he was old enough to lift a great stone and take the sword and sandals hidden beneath it, he set out to find him in Athens. The safe way was by sea. He chose the coast road round the Saronic Gulf instead, which was infested with bandits, and dealt with each one in the way they had treated travellers.
The route follows the six labours of that journey as Plutarch tells them in his Life of Theseus, written around AD 100 from much older tales. The places are real; the giants and robbers belong to myth, and several sites are traditional guesses.
