At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters.
The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.
Walter Mitty manages photo negatives at Life magazine in New York and escapes his dull days in elaborate daydreams. When the negative chosen for the last print cover goes missing, he has to track down its photographer, Sean O'Connell — to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas. Ben Stiller's 2013 film was shot on analog film, and almost all of its adventure was shot in Iceland.
This route starts at Life's real Manhattan home and then follows Walter through the Icelandic towns, harbour, mountain road, volcano and waterfall that stand in for Greenland and Afghanistan. The places are real; which country they play is not.
1937, between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. A giant breaks into Marshall College, steals a mummified cat and knocks out Indiana Jones. The trail leads Indy to a "Great Circle" of sacred sites spaced evenly around the globe, and into a race against the Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss to unlock its power. Todd Howard conceived the story of MachineGames' 2024 game, and its director pictured it as a "lost Indiana Jones adventure from the 1980s".
The circle and its secret are pure adventure fiction, but its stops are real: the Vatican, Giza, wartime Shanghai, the ruined Thai capital of Sukhothai and the ziggurat of Ur. The designers rebuilt them from books and photographs as they would have looked in the 1930s. This route follows the main story.
