Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is set in Brooklyn, New Jersey and Boston, but it was filmed in Newark, Bayonne, Athens on the Hudson, Lexington, Virginia, and Naugatuck, Connecticut. Ray Ferrier tries to get his children to their mother as alien tripods rise around them.
The route follows the film's flight in story order and shows where each scene was actually shot, from the first tripod to the final reunion. Several stops are film stand-ins, so pins mark towns rather than exact addresses.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and its sequels Modern Warfare 2 and 3 are set in real cities, from Pripyat and Rio de Janeiro to Washington, D.C., New York, Hamburg, Paris, Prague and Dubai.
This route follows the story of Price, Soap and Makarov across eight settings. The games' levels are invented layouts, so most pins mark the city rather than a mission spot.
Overwatch (called Overwatch 2 until February 2026) sets its European maps in real places: King's Row is a London neighborhood, Circuit Royal is Monte Carlo, Colosseo is Rome, Rialto is Venice and Esperança is inspired by Porto.
This route follows eleven maps west to east, from Grímsvötn in Iceland to Volskaya Industries near St. Petersburg, with the mode, the date each arrived and the real place behind it. Other routes cover Overwatch maps in the Americas and in Africa and Asia. Pins mark a real model place or landmark, not a copied district.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is set in Tokyo, but most of it was shot in Los Angeles; Shibuya Crossing is the best-known real Tokyo spot.
This route follows Sean Boswell from his Arizona school to the car meets, garages and mountain pass of the film, and shows the Los Angeles locations that stood in for Tokyo, from Hawthorne Plaza to San Gabriel Dam. Several scenes are pinned to the stand-in, not the story setting.
Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes follows a real 1878 walk from Le Monastier through Pradelles and the hills of Gévaudan to Pont-de-Montvert and Saint-Jean-du-Gard, with a night at a Trappist monastery on the way.
The route follows his stubborn donkey Modestine from the first purchase to her sale, at the end of the trail that now bears his name (GR 70). One stop, near Fouzilhac, is approximate because the book gives no precise position.
Detroit: Become Human is set in a near-future Detroit, 2038, where androids work and revolt among real landmarks like the Spirit of Detroit, the Monument to Joe Louis and Belle Isle.
The route follows six places where the game meets the real city, from downtown sculptures and Eastern Market murals to the suburb of Ferndale, the Packard plant and Belle Isle. The game is an approximation, not a recreation, so several stops are marked approximate or fictional.
Philip Pullman's Jordan College is a fictional Oxford college that borrows from Exeter College, with the Gyptians moored in Jericho and the trilogy's last promise made on a bench in the Oxford Botanic Garden. Film and TV shot Jordan at Christ Church and New College.
The route follows Lyra from her home college to the canal and the garden, with the film and series stand-ins. Jordan itself is invented, so some pins mark real stand-ins.
The Hunger Games was filmed almost entirely in North Carolina: District 12 is the abandoned Henry River Mill Village, the arena is DuPont State Forest with Triple Falls, and the Capitol parade rolls through Charlotte. The sequels moved to Atlanta, where Swan House, the Goat Farm Arts Center and the Marriott Marquis stand in for Snow's mansion, the District 12 Justice Building and the Capitol tribute center.
This route follows the story from the reaping to the Hanging Tree, with eight real places and what each one plays in the films. Some sites, such as Henry River Mill Village, are private, so check the guidance before you go.
8 Mile was filmed on location in Detroit: the trailer park in Warren, the New Center Stamping Plant, the Penobscot Building and the Shelter.
The route follows Jimmy Smith Jr. from his mother's trailer to the rap battles at the Shelter. It takes in the parking garage inside the old Michigan Theatre, the demolished Chin Tiki club and the empty lot where Cheddar Bob shoots himself. Some sites are gone; the Shelter and the Penobscot still stand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Percy Jackson is a twelve-year-old boy in New York City who has just learned that the Greek gods are real — and that Zeus's master bolt is missing. With Annabeth and Grover, he has ten days to cross the country, find the bolt and reach the Underworld beneath Los Angeles before a war breaks out on Olympus.
Rick Riordan's 2005 novel turns real American landmarks into monster stops: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Montauk beach, the Gateway Arch, a Denver water park, a Las Vegas casino that eats time, the Santa Monica Pier and the Empire State Building. A Disney+ series adapted the story from December 2023 to January 2024.
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, goes looking for the secret of immortality. This route follows the epic from its city to the Cedar Forest and the flood hero's home, then to the Nineveh library where the tablets were found.
The poem's places are legend and the tablets' places are archaeology; each stop says which, and which pins are only candidates. The Iraqi sites are not visitor destinations.
Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and then went back to Maryland about 13 times, bringing out some 70 people. Her work depended on a chain of Quakers, free Black ministers and abolitionists who hid and moved people north.
The route follows that chain from the Eastern Shore through Wilmington and Philadelphia to Niagara and Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, then to her farm at Auburn. Real routes were kept secret, so most pins are approximate.
Cut off from the rest of the country, Leningrad lived through the winter of 1941–42 on 125 grams of bread a day, half of it sawdust. This route follows the siege through the places that carried the city through: a fortress island, an ice road, a seed bank, a diary, a symphony.
It runs from the first day of the encirclement to the memorials that came after, and keeps to documented facts. Several stops are memorials: please visit with respect.
In 2035 Artyom leaves the Moscow Metro on a stolen train, the Aurora, and finds that Russia beyond the city is still alive. The sequel to Metro 2033 turns a Moscow underground story into a rail journey across the whole country.
The route follows the Volga, the Ark at Yamantau, the Caspian and Novosibirsk to Lake Baikal. The game's places are invented versions of real ones, so every pin is an area, not a level.
A search for the Land of Cinnamon turned into the first descent of the Amazon from the Andes to the sea. Francisco de Orellana, with the friar Gaspar de Carvajal as chronicler, followed unmapped rivers, fought off warriors on the banks and gave the river the name it still carries.
The route runs from Quito to the Napo, the Rio Negro, the Amazon's mouth and the pearl island of Cubagua. River stops are approximate, and dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar still in use then.
Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas, 1799–1804: Cumaná in Venezuela, the electric eels of Calabozo, Chimborazo in Ecuador, Callao in Peru, the silver mine at Guanajuato and Jefferson's White House. He and Aimé Bonpland spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing.
This route follows eight stops from the landing at Cumaná to Washington in 1804. Several pins are approximate because the sources name a region or river rather than one spot.
In 1961 Yuri Gagarin trained at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield, launched from Baikonur and came down near Engels. Less than two hours in space made the pilot a worldwide celebrity; his capsule is kept in a museum in Korolev City.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby on two invented peninsulas, West Egg and East Egg, but he built them from the Long Island he knew in Great Neck, where he lived from October 1922. Behind the glamour sit a dump, a station and a hotel suite that were all real.
This route follows Nick from the Eggs through the valley of ashes, Penn Station, the Queensboro Bridge and the Plaza Hotel. The Eggs, the valley and Gatsby's house are invented, so their pins mark the real places the novel is read against.
Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy.
The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.
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.
