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Anachronism Stew / Video Games

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Games with their own pages:

Other examples:

  • 64th Street: A Detective Story is allegedly set in 1939, but the mooks harassing you are dressed up as punks from the 1980s. There are also pirate enemies lifted from the Age of Piracy (somehow) and a futuristic robot boss.
  • The normal gameplay in the Age of Empires series is fairly accurate. However, one anachronism has been introduced for combined Rule of Funny and Rule of Cool: you can get a car that shoots bullets which can level entire cities through cheats, respectively "big daddy" in the first game and "how do you turn this on" in the second. Try it.
    • The first game also had cheat codes to get astronauts armed with laser guns or miniature nukes.
    • The third game had a monster truck that runs everything over. Yes, even buildings.
  • Age of Empires III has a lot of this because of how Ages work:
    • The British provide the most blatant example, as they can be fielding medieval longbowmen alongside musket-toting redcoats and Congreve rockets as late as the Imperial Age, which is supposed to represent the tail-end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century.
    • Likewise the Portuguese special units are the Cazadores, a kind of light infantry from the Napoleonic wars, and the Ribauldequin, a multi-barreled organ gun that went out of fashion by the end of the War of the Roses.
    • The Chinese are represented by a mish-mash of units representing the Ming and Qing dynasties, over four hundred years of Chinese history.
    • It gets worse in The Warchiefs which at one point has pikemen, musketeers and hussars participating in the Battle of Little Bighorn, a battle which it bears reminding happened in 1876.
    • When fully upgraded, American units wear uniforms from The American Civil War, which is several years past the mostly Napoleonic-era uniforms worn by the Europeans. There are even a few internal instances of this, such as the General continuing to wear a Revolutionary War-era uniform or them being able to field Gatling Guns crewed by Revolutionary War-era soldiers.
    • One of the latest additions to the game is the Mexican civilization. Yes this means you can get both the Mexicans and Aztecs coexisting.
    • The Italians can gain Leonardo da Vinci's Tank as one of their possible Imperial Age bonuses...after getting Risorgimento-era Bersaglieri the age before.
    • The Maltese are arguablly one of the biggest examples of this trope, as most of their unique units wear outdated armor. Of these, the biggest offender is the Hospitaller, which wears a mail surcoat and tabard straight out of The Crusades while similar units wear only slightly more period-accurate suits of armor. It doesn't end there, for if certain cards or techs are sent, the Hospitaller can end up wearing either a great helm or an even more egregious top hat and pistol (the latter of which did not exist during the timeframe their armor comes from).
  • ANNIE: Last Hope have a flashback of Annie's childhood, where she sneaks into Jack's room to have a conversation with him. A Sony PlayStation (debuting 1994) is somehow in Jack's room, despite the flashback being somewhere in the late-70s or mid-80s.
  • In Azur Lane, modern flatscreen televisions, video games and online shopping exist, and the ersatz Coca-Cola uses a modern bottle design. This is a game supposedly set in World War II. Handwaved due to Imported Alien Phlebotinum.
  • Big Nose Freaks Out: The prehistoric setting of the game contains Flintstone-esque civilization with modern conveniences and technology like banks, cars, factories, and hot air balloons. Big Nose himself rides around on the caveman equivalent of a skateboard.
  • Bloody Spell, a wuxia-themed game set in the Ming Dynasty, has plastic rakes and inflatable hammers as a Nerf Arm. And that's not getting into the alternate outfits like spy catsuits, modern-day nurse uniforms, and qipaos you can unlock.
  • Chimps On A Blimp: Takes place in the 1920s; yet includes skateboards, snowboards, and floating cyborg chimpanzees.
  • For Honor presents the three factions with a mish-mash of historical equipment, justified by the setting being a Low Fantasy and of course, Rule of Cool.
    • The Samurai wear armours that mix together elements from the Heian to Edo periods pretty haphazardly, and the rigid sections aside from the helmets are depicted as being made of wood. While there is some archaeological evidence of wooden armour being used in the Yayoi period (ca. 300 BC – 250 AD), the lamellae and plates of armour were made of iron and/or rawhide from the Kofun period onward, meaning it's probably safe to say that no historical samurai ever armoured himself with woodnote .
    • The Conqueror's cylindrical Great Helm, Maille armour, Tabard, and shield are all twelfth to thirteenth century Crusader era equipment, while the Lawbringer's full plate armour and anti-armour poleaxe are from the 15th Century and later. In story, plate armour is a closely-guarded secret of the Lawbringer's order; most other Knights make do with chainmail and whatever pieces of plate they can get their hands on.
    • The Vikings go straight into Schizo Tech: lacking advanced armour and weapons but having access to gunpowder-based grappling hooks and a massive mountainside elevator.
    • The Centurion's three main armour sets are based off of armour from different eras of Roman history. He has Republican Lorica Musculata, Imperial Lorica Segmentata, and Byzantine Klivanion.
    • The Highlander has sets based on the modern kilt, as well as others based on the early modern great kilt and medieval lĂ©ine that modern kilts derive from.
    • The Medjay is the biggest offender, given his Ancient Egyptian origin being very, very, far removed chronologically compared to the other factions.
  • In Gemstone Warrior and Gemstone Healer, the "ancient black thing" appears as a 5ÂĽ inch floppy disk.
  • In the (sort of) High Fantasy world of Kingdom O' Magic, one of the more powerful weapons your chosen character can wield is the Chainsaw of the Elder Folk. There's also a quest to find a working microphone for the Elvis Golem.
  • In the fan game Memories Of Mana we find electric lamps, radios, and suchlike in homes all over our otherwise medival world.
  • Most if not all Chinese MMORPGs feature sexy women in stylized silk lingerie and very short skirts (if they even bother wearing one) as their everyday outfits that is more common in the present day, despite most of the games (usually) took place during the Three Kingdoms period. Though they aren't necessarily be encountered in the game anyway.
  • Slaps and Beans have your characters referencing Terminator 2: Judgment Day during a cutscene (by mugging a mook while telling him you need his "boots, pants and motorcycle") despite the game being set in the 1970s, before the franchise even existed. There's also references to Mr. Bean, Back to the Future and Metal Gear Solid despite the setting. And then the game throws a Mini-Mecha from out of nowhere as it's last boss.
  • Super Robot Wars not only utilizes this trope traditionally, its status as a Massive Multiplayer Crossover means that it also commonly applies it to the fictional universes that are included in each game:
  • In OutRun 2006, one of the last tracks is located in some ancient Mexican ruins. However, these ruins are more of a mishmash of all the ancient ruins in Mexico. In this track, you can see the big Olmec stone heads from when Egypt was still ruled by the pharaohs; the big Pyramid of the Sun from when the Roman Empire was about to conquer all Europe; human-sized columns, known as atlantes, built by the Toltecs when Europe was waging the Crusades; and big Aztec and Mayan temples made shortly before the Spanish conquistadores came to kick some butt. However, since the ruins do look like ancient Mexican ruins, a trained eye might as well not care much about that, maybe finding it rather amusing.
  • Shadow Hearts: From The New World causes problems with its attempt to jump on the "What really happened in Roswell" bandwagon... as the game is set in 1929, 18 years before the Roswell incident. Not that this is anything new for Shadow Hearts, or that the series has ever tried for historical accuracy in the first place. Let us put it this way: one of the people in the crashed vehicle is a Magical Girl vampire.
    • The historical inaccuracies start in the first game, with Mata Hari's bikini and cell phone. It also looks like history textbooks have all failed to mention Japan had combat robots during WWI.
    • Shadow Hearts IS this trope. We've got the heroes zipping around in a giant nuclear-powered flying ship which can circle the globe in no time flat. We've got Anastasia (yes, THAT Anastasia) running around taking Polaroids. We've got Johnny wielding a cellphone (whereas Mata Hari's was a clunky 80's model, his is a modern fliptop phone with viewscreen). We've got people going into outer space. We've got supercomputers popping up everywhere. We've got genetically enhanced apes with human intelligence and laser guns. All before 1930. Not that any of this is a problem.
  • The Monkey Island series has this in spades, cheerfully throwing vending machines, electric devices and Elvis pins into the 17th century Caribbean. Given the tone of the series, this is often cheerfully lampshaded, as in The Curse of Monkey Island when Guybrush complains about the "shoddy, 17th century electrical wiring" during a puzzle involving stage lights.
    • The third game has a mini-game based on Sid Meier's Pirates!. In order to defeat better-armed pirates, you have to go back into down to trade in your old cannons for some newer ones. They increasingly feature more complex attachments, including laser sight, targeting computers, and coffeemakers.
  • Terranigma is a bewildering and complex example. At the start of the game the continents have yet to form, then you, the player character, goes to the surface and creates plants, then birds, then mammals. Then as you progress through the game you visit progressively more technologically advanced towns going from primitive huts through the discovery of America and invention of such wonders as the light-bulb, through to a future with robots and cures for all disease. The thing is all these towns exist simultaneously on the world map and you can go back and forth between them at will. This is justified in the game itself by suggesting that time isn't quite right.
  • Samurai Shodown is a clearinghouse of this. The games are set in 1788-1811, yet Texas and San Francisco are part of the United States, Amakusa Shiro (1621-1638) and Hattori Hanzo (1542-1596) are both alive, Prussia is a feudal kingdom with castles, armored knights, and an Arthurian king, the White House has its modern appearance, and there are robots.
    • Jubei Yagyu (1607-1650), and the two principals and their stage are based on a legendary duel that happened in 1612. At least these are big names who could justifiably be put together in an "all-star" swordfighting game. Houston and San Francisco are a lot harder to justify, as there are plenty of colonial locations that would be suitable (Boston and Atlanta, for example).
    • One of the ninja characters is a blonde-haired blue-eyed American surfer from California. This does not gel with the stated year of the game in several respects.
    • One of the other characters marries Queen Victoria, who wasn't even born until 1819.
    • The other original American character's style of clothing is clearly that of a 1980's style punk rocker.
  • Mortal Kombat: Deception is guilty of this. The protagonist Shujinko hails from an Medieval style Chinese village, with no technology to speak of, but at the same time there are US special forces, robots and movie stars hanging around.
  • Koei's Dynasty Warriors series is full of this, including ancient Chinese girls in shorts, Emperors-in-the-making who use modern slang, and rocket-propelled battle lances. Zhou Tai also carries a katana, something that would not be invented, in a country that barely exists then, for another 1200 years.
  • The Warriors Orochi series takes the cast of the above mentioned Dynasty Warriors and has them do battle with the cast of Samurai Warriors, despite the fact that the eras of the Three Kingdoms and Warring States are about a millenium apart. Games throughout the series have also tossed in folk heroes and deities from China and Japan, plus Greecian warriors and modern-day ninjas for good measure.
  • Speaking of Samurai Warriors, it also dabbles in Anarchronism Stew: two characters, Nagamasa Azai and Muneshige Techibana, wield medieval European weapons (a lance and a claymore with a shield, respectively).
  • Scribblenauts: This can be invoked by the player, but a few levels do this on their own. This is especially prevalent in the overworld levels of Scribblenauts Unlimited. For example, the pirate ship level features pirates from The Golden Age of Piracy, ninjas, and an internet pirate.
  • Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. Despite being set in Ancient Egypt, it has a Gentleman Adventurer dressed like he's from the 1800s, a mini-game that includes what appear to be Christmas trees, Chihuahuas (yes, in Ancient Egypt), and more. Although what the game calls "Chihuahuas" are much larger and resemble a different breed of dog, and when mummified they turn into something resembling a pug.
  • The Legend of Tian-ding is set in 1900s Taiwan... and you fight enemies armed with modern-day riot shields, firearms that doesn't exist until after the Second World War, and steampunk Sentry Guns. There's also the first boss, who sics turrets armed with Laser Sight on you. Then again the game runs on Rule of Cool.
  • Leifeng Pagoda features Chinese Vampire enemies, clad in traditional Manchurian-era robes like most depictions of Chinese vampires... in a game set in the Ming Dynasty, around the 1540s which would be a century before the Qing Dynasty where the jiangshi myths originates from.
  • Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, while set in an Alternate Earth, is still an example because the ages (and locations) of several historical figures were fudged to get them into the game. Specifically, Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli were thrown forward in time (in the real world, they died in 1519 and 1527 respectively, so in the game world they were either born later or are over a century old) and Galileo was thrown back (the bulk of his work actually happened in the 17th century, not the 16th). And add to that the fact that Leonardo invents a steam engine.
  • Bushido Blade, which featured a huge mishmash of characters using weapons from wildly disparate time periods and cultures in what appears to be isolationist Japan. However, the game is set in the modern day, which becomes apparent about three missions into the campaign.
  • Eternal Evil is set in 2001, and the police station contains what appears to be MacBook laptops from 2006.
  • The developers admitted ahead of time that Empire: Total War would have its anachronisms, such as the presence of steamships even though the game's timeline ends by 1800.
    • Total War: Shogun 2: If you have the original game along with the Rise of the Samurai and Fall of the Samurai DLCs, you can have a battle between a 19th century army with riflemen, cannons, revolver/carbine cavalry and Gatling guns, up against a 16th century army of ashigaru and samurai warriors armed with spears, swords, bows and matchlock muskets. In a head-on fight in an open field, the modern army will usually win pretty handily, but with the right tactics, the traditionalists can pull through and win it Hint . You even get an achievement for winning a battle like this as either side.
    • Rome: Total War, despite starting out looking like a fairly historically accurate game, devolves into silliness pretty quickly from a historian's perspective. "Egyptian" troops are portrayed using sickle-swords and chariots and generally dressing like stereotypical Egyptians from, say, the New Kingdom era (i.e. centuries before the game's time frame). The Egypt of the time was thoroughly Hellenized; having them dress up like characters from The Mummy makes about as much sense as a World War II game where the Japanese fight with katana and yumi-ya.
    • Medieval II: Total War continues this by depicting Scotland as essentially Braveheart-land, where Highlanders, the backbone unit of a Scottish army, wear blue woad on their faces (several centuries too late) and wear tartan kilts (several centuries too early).
    • The Medieval II conversion mod Thera takes this and makes sweet love to it. You have various civilisations ranging wildly in technology levels: you have the Faustian Reich with their renaissance armies bristling with pikes and muskets, to the stone age Paynal Empire who haven't even invented the wheel. The Romuli Empire is otherwise the Roman Empire except they can develop musketeer legionnaires wearing full lorica armour. You can also even hire mercenaries from other civilizations, allowing further anachronisms. An army on the march might soon become a bizarre mix of musketeer companies, cannon batteries and rocket elephants supported by medieval swordsmen and Mesoamerican natives wearing wooden armour and fighting with stone-tipped spears.
  • It would be easier to list the things that aren't anachronistic in Soulcalibur's version of the 16th century. It mostly comes up in the costumes (which run on Rule of Cool and Rule of Sexy rather than historical basis or combat utilitarianism), but there are also some Steampunk and Clock Punk elements here and there — you have Yoshimitsu the Ambiguously Human ninja with a clockwork prosthetic arm, the big carousel in Hilde's kingdom Wolfkrone (pretty much the closest thing the setting has to a Advanced Ancient Acropolis), and Ashlotte from IV who is a full-fledged automaton. You also have Sophitia, who dresses like a warrior from ancient Greece and is stated to worship Hephaestus in a time where Greece was ruled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Greeks had been Christianised for over one thousand years (and quite insistent on it too).
  • The second half of Mafia II took place in 1951, and yet most of the songs that you'll hear during the 1950s portions of the game weren't released yet.
    • And so do the vehicles. Even the 1940s chapters had some anachronisms, like with Al Hirt's "Java" being played on the radio despite the song being released in 1964.
    • Mafia III avoids this for the most part, except for a few minor mistakes.
      • During the mission "Yet Here We Are", punk rock covers of Bad Moon Rising, Paint It Black, You Belong to Me and Palisades Park, performed by Mourning Ritual, Avengers, The Misfits and The Ramones, respectively, will play on the radio, despite being recorded as early as the mid 1970s and as late as 2014. This is likely intentional, though, as compared to the original covers of these songs (which will play outside of the mission), they are likely supposed to represent the end of Lincoln Clay's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
    • The design of some of the electronics advertised in-game as "new" hint more at the late '50s to early '60s.
    • Some of the cars mostly fit their time period, but some of them are based on cars that came out a few years after, such as the Berkley Stallion (1969 Ford Mustang), Lassiter Palatine (1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III), De'Leo 58 (1970 Datsun 240Z) and Eckhart Champion (1975 Plymouth Gran Fury).
  • Granblue Fantasy: The game has a Medieval feel to it in general, but the Robomi events incorporate Robots, Kamen Riders, Kaijus, and Alien Abominations as a homage to the 20th Century. Not to mention that there are also guns, cannons, alchemy, and Magitek.
  • The Western adventure GUN, set some time after the Civil War enables you to enter a series of Texas Hold 'Em Poker tournaments to win money and completion percentage. However, the Texas Hold 'Em variant was actually invented in the early 20th century.
  • Sierra's Quest for Glory series is a mixture of different mythologies and technologies making up different regions of the game world, ranging from the medieval pseudo-Germanic Spielburg to the almost Victorian-era Mordavia, as well as random pop-culture references, x-ray glasses, and junk dealers trying to sell you used World War I gas masks.
    Junk dealer from Wages of War: Just look at all these almost-new items, every one a guaranteed anachronism!
  • The Resistance series of games, despite being set in the 1950s, feature futuristic weapons and machinery. However, this can be explained with the fact that they are all Chimera inventions rather than human.
    • Resistance also occurs in an alternate timeline that diverged right before the Spanish-American War, Nikola Tesla got lucky with his inventions, and the Chimera technology helped later.
  • Most of the Castlevania games aren't too bad about this, but many of Symphony of the Night's recovery items simply did not exist in the late 18th Century. Hamburgers weren't around to start with, but how can they also be "100% US grade A?" There was no Department of Agriculture at the time!
    • Also, there's enemies who use guns, or skeletons riding motorcycles. On the other hand, the ones in Symphony of the Night used muskets, which were around back then (even though it still falls under this, since we see them reloading their "muskets" from the breech and dropping empty shells when metallic cartridges were still almost 50 years from being invented). The Gatling guns in Bloodlines make sense too, as it takes place right before World War II anyways.
    • Arguably averted in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, which are set 20 Minutes into the Future.
    • And in Order of Ecclesia, tin men and robot enemies in the early 1800s! While a few such things did exist at the time, they were in no way advanced enough to fight.
      • Not that those things are any more advanced than Frankenstein's Monster, which fits right in with the setting despite showing up as many as 400 years before the events of Frankenstein.
    • In Harmony of Dissonance, you can find an "Old Radio" as a decoration for your room. Despite the fact that it takes place in 1748, and Marconi wouldn't play La Bamba for another 150 years. You can also get a phonograph.
    • Curse of Darkness has a room-decorating side-quest where you collect chairs. As seen here, probably half of the chairs don't belong in the 15th century. That's before mentioning some of the weirder weapons, such as a guitar. But then again, this game also features a time traveller.
  • Much like the Castlevania games that inspired it, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has things which couldn't have been found in 19th-century England. Justified somewhat by O.D.'s explanation that the demons have surpassed humans in terms of technological advancement:
    • The steam train was invented some time during the Industrial Revolution, but admitting passengers using photo-ID passport was still centuries ahead of time.
    • One enemy, Tamako-Death, is a rocker chick complete with an electric guitar. Electric guitars only started showing up early in the 20th century.
  • The Sengoku Basara games and anime takes several Samurai warlords, some of which lived decades apart, places them in the late Sengoku era, and throws in such anachronistic elements as shotguns, miniguns, rocket launchers, a horse with Harley Davidson exhaust pipes, Humongous Mecha, and more.
  • While the tech trees of the Civilization games are fairly historically correct, in practice it's quite common for a civ to be defending a city with rifleman, longbow archers and club-wielding warriors at the same time, and that time maybe around 700AD.
    • If you focus on developing science, you may find your mechanised infantry assaults are facing pikemen and musketeers.
    • And, of course, spearmen fighting tanks. And defeating them.
    • In Civ: Revolutions, there's a goody hut that can grant an advanced unit. Getting a tank in the Bronze Age is a happy event that allows one to steamroll the rest of the world in extremely short order.
    • An even more fun example: founding Christianity well before the switch from BC to AD.
    • The civilizations themselves are all sorts of anachronism. You could be discussing trade relations with Ramesses II (1274 BC), Alexander the Great (335 BC), Wu Zetian (700 AD), and George Washington (1775 AD) all at the same time! Obviously, this is an Acceptable Break from Reality as well as an example of the Rule of Fun.
    • Due to the bonuses the AI gets and the player's attempts to keep up, this will happen in higher difficulties.
    • Bayblon has this as a game mechanic in VI. Since they fully learn a technology when earning a Eurekanote , with the right Eurkeas they can jump far ahead of the Tech tree, allowing them to take over the world with airplanes both before the invention of gunpowder and the birth of Christ.
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising takes place during the age of Greek gods. Schizo Tech abounds: on top of laser weapons and Mini-Mecha, the Greek Gods also seem to have access to the Internet (complete with its own version of Wikipedia), pizza delivery, motorized drills, and matchlock rifles, just to name a few examples. The food in the game also clashes with the setting: it's a safe bet that they didn't have tempura in ancient Greece.
  • Pirate Hunter is set in the 16th Century, during the The Golden Age of Piracy. The food upgrade that grants your health to maximum? Pizza (not even the type from the mid-1850s when pizza was first invented, but a slice that looks like it's from a modern-day restaurant).
  • Portal Stories: Mel parodies this - after obviously spending many years in storage (which was supposed to be a few hours), Mission Control tries to stop you from panicking by explaining the Post-apocalyptic damage as the result of earthquakes...which were so powerful, they even knocked some things from the future into different time periods.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The series is ostensibly set in a world in Medieval Stasis. It also happens to have boomerangs, photography, remotely-detonated bombs, complex mechanisms in a simple clock tower, grappling hook pistols, pipelines, hydroelectric power plants, Star Wars-esque holograms, 17th-18th Century pirates, modern-looking mineshafts, electromagnets, combination operated safes, sumo, steam-ships, and motorboats. Oh yeah, and lasers. All this being said, the Zelda franchise has never been intended to be set in a ye olde setting from the start. One of the earliest concepts for the Triforce, the franchise's signature holy triangles, was that they were computer chips, and there were going to be sci-fi aspects integrated into the story. Link to the Past's original storyline also involved a more literal interpretation of the title, incorporating Link travelling to a futuristic, sci-fi hyrule (artwork left over from this concept is even shown in Hyrule Historia, including Zelda garbed in a sci-fi style outfit). The first few games were simply downgraded to a generic ye olde fantasy setting both because that was the norm for the time, and because made for the easiest open world to implement. The series just stuck with this idea, turning it into a vague medieval setting although remnants of the original intentions remain in everything mentioned above and below.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening includes a crane game, telephones, ratchet reel fishing poles, and electric organ. The DX remake adds a photography studio.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time includes a neon sign and jukebox.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker adds such items as autonomous ships and cannons, electronics, and Gohdan, a giant robot boss.
    • Link also gets a robot buddy in one game. This same game also has a mechanic character who's building a washing machine, and where the robots come from, there is hover technology (complete with Tron Lines) and cloaking devices. Making this really hilarious is that this is supposed to be the earliest game in the timeline. Granted, though, the robots, hover tech, cloaking devices and whatnot are implied to be from a Precursor civilization that has long since been wiped out. Said precursors also built a wooden pirate ship with an electric engine and a cloaking device.
    • Spirit Tracks added trains, steam-powered tanks, turrets, and throwaway jokes about films and electric bills.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild got even bigger with the whole "Precursor" bit. One of the major aspects of the quest involves Link reclaiming the "Divine Beasts" from the control of Ganon. Said beasts are gigantic mechanical constructions that are Magitek and possess advanced weaponry, including the ability to conjure electricity and shoot high-powered lasers. The same game also features drone-like sentries, suits made entirely of vulcanized rubber, and the Sheikah Slate, a powerful electronic device that allows the user to unlock ancient doors and cast spells. There's also the introduction of modular homes, which didn't exist in the real world until the 20th century.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is borderline Steampunk in the expansion of its technology. In the modern day, the Sheikah technology from 10,000 years ago has been thoroughly studies and advanced to create a copy of the Sheikah Slate called the Purah Pad, as well as several new inventions like hot air balloons and complex electrical devices. However, it also turns out that similar devices existed even earlier, during the current version of Hyrule's founding prior to the first appearance of The Calamity. This includes fully sapient robots, electric motors, lasers, rockets, gyroscopic stabilizes, and capsule vending machines capable of discerning multiple types and values of tokens.
  • Wolfenstein (2009): right there after the first level in the first black market room, there is a table with a bunch of bundles of money, easily recognizable for almost all Germans who are old enough to play this game: 100-DM bills (100 Deutsche Mark) in the new variant, that was introduced October 1st, 1990. So Nazis not only use Psychic Powers now, they also have Money that won't be around for another 50 years...fantastic!
  • Somewhat justified in Wolfenstein: The New Order, which is set in an Alternate History version of 1960, yet features music reminiscent of the late sixties, computers from the late seventies, giant robots, and space technology of the far future.
  • The Backyard Sports series take place in the late 1970s-early 1980s, judging by the appearance of pro players in the games, yet many characters talk of 1980s events (such as Italy winning the World Cup) as being long before their time. Lampshaded by Barry Bonds in the 2001 edition, where he says that his father played in the majors a long time before he was a kid, and then realizing time doesn't go that slowly.
  • Ganbare Goemon has this to an extent. The American and French film industries hadn't started up when Japan was in the Edo period. Also, Ridiculously Human Robot and Super Robot that is also ridiculously human.
  • Though Assassin's Creed shows a surprising amount of research (for a video game), they made many mistakes that do not agree with the history and architecture of Ancient Jerusalem at all. This includes Ottoman flags for the Turks (100 years too soon), the Lions' Gate (300 years too soon), and a golden dome on the Dome of the Rock (750 years too soon!), and many others. However, this is explained in-game, with most of history being either deliberately distorted by the Templars or the Pieces of Eden; the history shown in-game is supposed to be the setting's "actual" history, taken directly from the memories of those who were actually there.
    • Similar issues abound in the sequel, such as the circumstances surrounding Caterina Sforza's husband (who was supposed to have died in the incident with the Orsi, not by her hand), and some of the paintings you can buy (for instance, Titian's "Venus Anadyomene" wasn't painted until 1520, quite some time after the end of the game). There are also issues with some of the armors you can buy, and weapons you acquire being a tad ahead of their time, just like in the first game.
    • In Assassin's Creed: Revelations, you can defend Assassin Dens with pinpoint (i.e. the margin of error is measured in feet) artillery strikes. It's not clear where the cannons would be firing from, as the attacks happen deep inside cities. We can only presume they're positioned away from the city and are somehow able to hit the broadside of a barn.
  • Bloodline Champions has a general "tribal" theme for the characters, but the Gunner bloodline fires two weapons that resemble flintlock carbines, as well as a mortar and rockets. The Engineer bloodline uses a 'boomstick', flamethrower, a jet pack, a tractor beam, shrink/enlarge device and can deploy an "EMP Pulse" where there are no implications of electronics in the setting otherwise whatsoever. With everything but the jet pack firing out of one weapon.
  • Several Star Wars video games actually contain fictional anachronisms. For example, Knights of the Old Republic and its spinoff MMORPG The Old Republic, which are set nearly 4,000 years before the original trilogy. Including, but not limited to, the use of the title "Darth" long before it was supposed to have originated (the Darths of KotOR have since been retconned as the first to use the title in Star Wars Expanded Universe canon); Chiss (a race virtually unknown in the galaxy until after the original trilogy) as a player character race in Old Republic; and the use of carbonite to freeze living beings (remember, the whole point of freezing Han in The Empire Strikes Back was to see if it was even possible to survive the process). Most can be handwaved by claiming that records from the Old Republic era are spotty, leading to information and technology being lost and rediscovered.
    • This is to say nothing of the appearance: lightsabers, starships, and clothing looked far more primitive in the Tales of the Old Republic comics, yet in KotOR, they are indistinguishable from "modern" times.
    • All of this pales in comparison to the state of the galaxy during the Sith Wars and following dark ages, which took place between the aforementioned MMO and the Ruusan reformation 1,000 years before The Phantom Menace. Records of the era are extremely spotty both in-universe and in real life, but there are reports of platemail-and-swords being the primary implements of war... while starships are still the primary mode of transportation.
    • Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) has a selection of hero units that doesn't quite fit: Yoda can fight Kylo Ren, for example, despite Yoda having died a few years before Ren's birth. You can even have Kylo Ren fighting alongside Darth Vader, despite the fact that this would cause Ren to Squee himself to death in short order. Funnily enough, when its lootbox system sparked an enormous controversy, one of EA's arguments was that they steered away from cosmetic microtransactions in order to prevent the Star Wars canon being broken by a pink Darth Vader skin, when one would think having Vader fight multiple people who weren't even born when he died would be a little harder to justify...
  • Similar to the above, Star Trek: Fleet Command, a Mobile Phone Game from the minds that ripped off Game of War: Fire Age, has a bunch of Continuity Snarls: characters from all over the franchise are recruitable as crew for your ships. This wouldn't be a problem if the franchise didn't involve an Alternate Timeline started when J. J. Abrams decided to reboot the series. Thus, there are four versions of Spock, all of whom can be used at the same time: the instructor from the first half of the 2009 film and the familiar Number Two from the second two, both played by Zachary Quinto; the Number Two played by Leonard Nimoy; and the version of him from the Prime Timepline prequels Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, played by Ethan Peck. All three can serve alongside Star Trek: The Next Generation's Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Quark (Armin Shimerman) and the cartoon character Ens. Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) from the Affectionate Parody Star Trek: Lower Decks, even though these characters are separated from the Spocks by a 100-year Time Skip.
  • Old DOS game God of Thunder plays with this constantly. Ignoring the premise of Thor having to go kill Loki, we have:
  • Team Fortress 2 has a trailer for the game's debut on the Mac in which a few classes are seen wearing earbuds. Even though the game is set in the 60s and earbuds wouldn't appear until at least 30 years later. Considering that the game exists in an alternate universe where Shakespearicles (William Shakespeare with muscles) invented America, the two-story building, and the rocket launcher for getting up to that second story, and where teleporters and cloaking devices are advanced enough to be set up within half a minute and used in battle, this should actually be classified as Schizo Tech.
    • There are high-tech computers and modern English warning signs in DeGroot Keep, which supposedly is a 10th century battlement. However, this is justified by the implication that the two teams are just fighting in a tourist attraction, since one of the unused textures for the stage is a ticket booth. That also explains the Demoman's family portrait being inside the castle as well as the announcer and sirens still being around.
    • The non-canon Mac update comic has the characters visiting a store that sells modern-day items.
    • A community-made item, "The Boston Boom-Bringer", is a boombox that can be equipped to Scout, and it plays hip-hop beats whenever the player taunts. Hats in general tend to follow Rule of Cool or Rule of Funny rather than being historically accurate.
    • Most of the Schizo Tech can be explained by the existence of the transformative element Australium, which considerably boosts the intellect of anyone brought into contact with it. It just so happens that the only cache lies under Australia, and thus Australia has become the most technologically advanced nation (inventing cloaking, teleportation, and mastering the entire spectrum of the mustache sciences). The existence of the Soldier's roommate also implies that there are magical forces at work as well.
    • Interestingly, there are some cursory details implying that Team Fortress Classic took place before Team Fortress 2 did, despite that setting using relatively modern automatic weaponry that wouldn't be seen until the actual 60s.
    • A good portion of the Soldier's domination lines towards the Sniper have him insultingly refer to him as Bilbo Baggins, a nod to how The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was filmed in New Zealand despite Sniper being from Australia. Nevermind the fact that not only does the game take place roughly half a century before said films were made, but New Zealand in the TF2 universe has sunken beneath the seanote .
  • Swords & Soldiers has the Vikings, the Aztecs, and the Chinese fight over a giant pepper.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops is especially anachronistic in regards to its weapons due to it featuring many modern firearms despite being set during The Vietnam War in the late 1960s, with entire guns and configurations appearing far before they're supposed to. The game implicitly handwaves it by claiming that all the weapons are 'prototype versions', despite things like the Kiparis and AUG only being developed in 1978, the SPAS-12 only entering production a year later, and worst of all, the inclusion of the FAMAS F1 FELIN (the base weapon was only developed in 1978 and the FELIN variant only came into existence in the late 1990s). Strange in some cases, in that an earlier version of an anachronistic gun, like the S&W Model 39 instead of the ASP or the original RPK instead of the RPK-74, would have existed for some time at points in the game. There are even musical anachronisms, as well; a level set in April 1961 has "Quimbara" from a February 1974 album playing over a radio, a later level set in January 1968 has "Fortunate Son" from November 1969 playing over another radio, and a third level just a month after set to "Sympathy for the Devil", from an album that not only released that December, but hadn't even begun recording until March. Also, fast-roping is performed throughout the game, a concept that wasn't invented until the Falklands War in 1982.
    • This isn't entirely new to the series. Some missions in earlier Call of Duty games commonly feature the STG-44 chronologically before it was actually produced (somewhat justified by the fact that superficially-similar weapons in its design history existed since at least 1942), and, going the other way, the climax of the British campaign in United Offensive has the player taking part in preliminary work for Operation Husky a full three days after the real operation began. Call of Duty 4 also had one section where Russian ultranationalists in 1996 had access to the G36C rifle (five years before it entered service anywhere; worse, the very next game after Black Ops features a flashback to that section with even more anachronistic Remington RSASS rifles in plain sight) and the Mi-28N Havoc helicopter (a few months before that version's first flight and a full decade before any were even delivered to the Russian Army; weirder is that in the rest of the game, when the Havoc should exist in the numbers it does, that very same faction no longer has any of them for some reason).
    • Call of Duty: Black Ops II, with its flashback missions set two decades after the first, has a much less anachronistic armory under usual circumstances; however, this can be deliberately invoked by the player after beating the game once, upon which they can, for instance, fight the Angolan Civil War in 1986 with an HK416 and an FNP-45, both developed after 2004. It also ends up having reverse-anachronisms because the flashback arsenal is nearly identical to the previous game's and not restricted to the flashback levels - such as the original model of the M16 available for the mission set during Operation Just Cause in 1989, even though at that point the Army had upgraded to the M16A2 (and would probably be using early models of M16 carbines that existed prior to the adoption of the M4 instead given the short-range urban combat), and then you can go even further and take it into levels set in 2025, where the US military has switched to the HK416 and an upgraded XM 8.
      • The RPD in Black Ops II manages to go both ways for this trope. It's in use with Soviet forces in 1986, fifteen years after the RPK and PK had replaced it... and it also has a Picatinny rail (by virtue of reusing the model from Modern Warfare 2) nine years before they were formally adopted and about twenty before the Russian military began using them.
  • There's one of these in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, in a bit of optional dialogue. Talk to Dr. Tsukumo after Ep. 9, and give the second answer to make him reference Schrödinger's Cat. The game is set in 1931 - four years too early for that! Whoops. Not too egregious, thanks to the pun ("Now, I know you like cats...", referencing the fact that Gouto follows Raidou everywhere) and the fact that it's optional.
  • Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is supposed to take place around the ninth century. But the capital city, Babylon, has the famous Hanging Gardens... which were destroyed around a thousand years before that point. Must be all that time travel.
  • The various Lego Adaptation Games don't even try to be consistent within the setting, let alone the time period. All of them run on the Rule of Funny though.
    • This is particularly obvious in the LEGO Star Wars games, during replays of the story campaign with random characters. For example, Darth Maul (dead) and Luke Skywalker (not born yet) team up to fight Count Dooku, or Boba Fett and a Battle Droid explore the Death Star, killing stormtroopers.
    • Also includes a Mythology Gag in LEGO Indiana Jones where you can find a secret area containing satellite dishes, referencing the fact that during production of Raiders of the Lost Ark, people were asked to take satellite dishes off of their roofs to make the area seem like ancient deserted ruins.
  • Shenmue takes place in the mid 1980s, but features items and Sega franchises that wouldn't be invented until the 1990s: Ryo can get figurines based on Virtua Fighter and Sonic the Hedgehog from gacha machines and play video games on a Sega Saturn.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, set in 1974, features weapons that weren't developed in Real Life for a few years. It also adds technology that had been invented years on within the series universe, such as the Soliton radar first introduced in Metal Gear Solid (set in 2005). A Walkman also appears in the game that was first made in 1979, and with research it can be turned into a modern model. MSF can also invent the MP3 player during this time. Handwaved as Snake has a plethora of geniuses at his disposal.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater takes place in 1964, but yet there are gaming magazines in certain areas, figurines of the Metal Gear REX and RAY units alongside Jehuty from Zone of the Enders in Granin's office (all thrown in as a simple gag), and CalorieMates (first came out in the 80s). In fact, the game even lampshades some of the futuristic (for the period) tech in conversations with Sigint:
      Naked Snake: (in regards to the thermal goggles) What, is that special or something?
      Sigint: Is it special? Here in the West, we've just barely got the technology to install it on aircraft.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes puts Big Boss on a rescue mission in a Captain Ersatz Guantanamo Bay... almost 30 years before 9/11, during the Cold War. The Phantom Pain proper, set in 1984, names the newest Metal Gear model after a species of hominid not discovered until 2002.
  • The first mission of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is set before the commencement of Operation Torch in Africa, but Grillo somehow acquires an American jeep.
  • Harvest Moon often has modern items like TVs, but never has the farming industry face any amount of industrialization.
    • Subverted in A Wonderful Life and its girl version where you can buy a Milking Room that will have the cows go in themselves and get milked, the milk cans ready for you to pick up. And it increases your Son's interest in Science.
  • Phantasy Star runs on this trope since it follows events in a solar system that routinely experiences catastrophic events. This leads to a combination of current people with varying levels of technology dealing with cyborgs and genetically engineered creatures from previous eras.
  • Caleb, the protagonist of Blood, makes very frequent pop-culture references. The problem is, the game is set in 1928, decades before most of the things he references came into existence. Even worse when you consider that Caleb is actually from the Civil War era and spent the entire intervening half-century as a buried corpse. The expansion for the second game is even worse; its levels are supposedly flashbacks to before the group joined the Cabal around the 1850s or so, but save for Caleb's first level (a reenactment of the beginning of the first game's second episode), they are nearly indistinguishable from the 20 Minutes into the Future setting of the base game; even ignoring the skyboxes, computers, and weapons taken from the base game, there are things like the very 1950s-esque sorority house from the second level and one of the new weapons being a combat shotgun from 1987.
    • Wikipedia also mentions that aside from the purely sci-fi gadgets like the Tesla Cannon, the spraycan he uses with a zippo lighter as a makeshift flamethrower would only be invented a few decades after the game is set. Likewise, the ammo pickups for the completely fictional Napalm Cannon are jerry cans, which (as the name implies) were a German invention from around World War II, and Caleb's shotgun of choice appears to be a Rossi Overland, a model that wouldn't enter production until 1978.note 
  • Kingpin: Life of Crime takes place in "a past that never happened". The game features, among other anachronisms, '90s rap music by Cypress Hill, people with cyborg-style body modifications, cars from the '30s and '40s and guns from the '20s.
  • Thanks to the almost limitless creativity on display, Minecraft may have a single world in which you can find the USS Enterprise, a medieval castle, and a village of dirt huts right next to each other, with a transportation network consisting of footpaths, minecart tracks, portals to Hell and space-warping command blocks.
  • The Professor Layton series is based off of 20th century England, sometime before or just after the 1960s, as indicated by the game's artbook. Despite this, Layton and Luke dress like they're from the 1900s, their view of London contains buildings built in the early 2000s mixed in with the historical locations of certain buildings (i.e, Scotland Yard), London looks Victorian and not at all post-war, space travel has already happened, and the games showcase steampunk robotics and time traveling. Good luck puzzling that one out.
    • This is made all the more confusing by the crossover with the Ace Attorney series. Placement in the Ace Attorney series puts the year as late-2018 to early 2019.
  • Pumpkin Jack:
    • Jack derisively calls his crow companion an "emo canary" at one point.
    • If Jack finds a gramophone, it will play a beat that Jack with then breakdance to.
  • One wouldn't expect this from an Alternate History game like Command & Conquer: Red Alert, but the maps seen in game all use the post-1945 borders. The game is set in a timeline where, due to Adolf Hitler being removed before the Nazis even came into power, World War II as we know it doesn't happen. There is at least one mission set in Poland that, if the game used pre-1939 maps, would instead take place in Germany.
    • There is also the modern and futuristic equipment used in the game; despite its early 1950s setting, the Allies are equipping their soldiers with M16A1s (adopted 1967), using M1 Abrams tanks (first entered service in 1980), flying AH-64D Apaches (entered service in 1997), and tracking enemy movement with GPS satellites (first launched in 1978), while the Soviets have access to the MiG-23 (introduced 1970) and the Mi-24 (1972).
  • E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy takes place a few thousand years in the future, yet a spinoff of the AK-47 is still in use, used alongside weaponized lasers. Psychic cyborgs wearing Powered Armor designed to look like a samurai's body armor with conical straw hats live inside a giant cathedral which has bottomless pits crossed by forcefield bridges. Katanas and warhammers have taken a level in badass and now make things explode. Federation starships drop off troops wielding anti-tank revolvers and Sawed-Off Shotguns with crucifix crosshairs, who are assisted by artificially intelligent combat drones and attack gunships which used vectored jet engines.
  • Used very deliberately in Bioshock Infinite. The game takes place in the floating city of Columbia in 1912, but as you explore the metropolis, you might begin to notice things that seem quite out of place. The most obvious example comes in the form of music. The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" (1966) is done by a barbershop quartet; a crowd sings "Goodnight Irene" (1933); a lone woman performs a gospel version of "Fortunate Son" (1969) by Creedence Clearwater Revival; a calliope arrangement of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" (1979) can be heard on a beach; and phonographs are discovered playing a soulful rendition of Gloria Jones's "Tainted Love" (released in 1964, made famous in 1981), a ragtime cover of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears (1985), and an Al Jolson-esque singer performing R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" (1991). There are also technologies and books on scientific theories circulating in the city that weren't developed until decades after the game takes place. These are all signs that the quantum particles that are used to make the city stay permanently suspended have damaged the space-time continuum, creating gaps, or "tears," in the air. These tears are windows into the future, and unscrupulous individuals, including the Fink brothers, seize the opportunity to steal songs, texts, and ideas that have yet to be created in 1912 and pass them off as their own. Main character Elizabeth can create these tears at will, which explains why the rulers of Columbia want her to stay there.
  • Fallout:
    • The series contains many references to various pop culture icons such as Doctor Who, Star Trek and Indiana Jones, despite the fact that Fallout takes place in an alternate timeline where history diverged after World War II, which would logically make those references out of place in Fallout's own universe.
    • The Fallout 3 DLC Operation Anchorage has Vertibirds in the simulation, which according to in-universe history were still in the prototype phase at the time of the Anchorage liberation. Information on computer terminals in the game imply that the simulation is vastly different from what "actually" happened.
  • Evil Genius: on the one hand, it's ostensibly set in the 1960s, but on the other hand you have genetic engineering, giant lasers, advanced satellite technology, Pong cabinets, automated sentry turrets and an AI supercomputer named TIM. Developer notes indicate that whenever they found something that looked interesting they put it in whether it was sixties-appropriate or not.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV is set in 1492 in the fictional Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, where the top warriors, known as "Samurai", wield Holographic Terminals. Things get very weird when the Samurai dive deep into the forbidden depths of Naraku and discover modern-day Tokyo.
  • March of War features Korean Archers serving beside World War II era tanks (and armored vehicles and attack helicopters from the 1960s and 1970s) during the 1940s.
  • Touhou Soccer is supposedly filled with Middle Age women as of shrine maidens, witches, maids, and youkais with respective Pimped Out Dresses they're wearing into a soccer game. Granted, it's an Affectionate Parody, but it's still confusing because the teams can't be distinguished without proper jerseys.
  • In the Ultima series, Ultima I and Ultima II feature space travel. In Ultima III, the Big Bad is a computer operated by punch cards. In The Savage Empire, the Lost World of Eodon contains a number of modern items brought by explorers, and there is an Advanced Ancient Acropolis with advanced technology. In Ultima VII, there is a Kilrathi spaceship. In Ultima VII Part II, there is a working computer with copies of Strike Commander, Wing Commander: Privateer, and Ultima VIII.
  • PokĂ©mon Conquest: Is this Feudal Japan with things from the more modern PokĂ©mon games, or modern times with an inexplicably Feudal culture? The game seems to imply the latter, but it's a baffling mix either way.
    • Mewtwo's a genetic experiment. What's he doing in feudal Japan?
    • The clothing style of some of the Warlords. Sun visors probably weren't a standard in Japanese fashion back then. Ditto Masanori with his Kamina Shades, and Gracia's top hat.
    • Violight and Valora. The former is essentially a feudal Japanese power plant, and the latter is a feudal Japanese factory with security cameras and automated cranes.
    • If you command a Warlord to move to a non-adjacent nation, they travel by blimp.
    • There are also several obvious computer monitors in the Bank, seen in the background when interacting with its shopkeeper.
    • When Keiji's Warrior Skill is activated his dialogue comes up 'Set your faces to stunned!' Pretty funny, but then you realise that this samurai warrior from Sengoku Period pre-unification Japan has just made a Star Trek reference.
  • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, for the most part, does not care about its 1995 setting when determining what craft are available. In the case of the Hornet, at least, it goes for a variant that was actually in service at that point in time, rather than the Super Hornet... but it also includes an even more anachronistic electronic warfare plane based on the Super Hornet (first flight in 2006), the Eurofighter Typhoon (introduced 2003), the production version of the F-22 (not finalized until 1996), and the F-35C (the Joint Strike Fighter program that led to its prototype didn't start until a year after the game's setting). There are even fictional anachronisms, as the player is able to unlock both the ADF-01 FALKEN from Ace Combat 2 and the X-02 Wyvern from Ace Combat 04, despite the former having been designed because of the outcome of the game's plot and the latter not having its first flight until after AC2 according to background material. Most of this could possibly be explained, however, by the focus on air power in the Ace Combat setting leading to these aircraft having been developed earlier than in real life - the whole series also indulges quite heavily in rare vehicles, arming entire air forces with hundreds of planes that were one-of-a-kind tech demonstrators or never-produced proposals in the real world.
  • Can happen in the Rush Hour expansion to SimCity 4. You can choose from the six styles of building that will show up in your city; these are by default set to cycle every five years (which you can increase or decrease), reflecting how, in a real city, changing fashions in architecture lead to neighborhoods built at the same time having fairly consistent architectural styles. There is an option, however, where you have all the styles build at once, leading to an architectural version of this trope. (On the other hand, you can lengthen the cycles or even ban up to five of the styles, leading to the architectural opposite of this trope.)
  • In the EarthBound (1994) ROM Hack EquestriaBound: While the show has shown that ponies are more technologically advanced than one might think, they have never shown anything like cars and vans and such in it. As such, with some areas like Onett only getting a rename and some mild aesthetic changes (like renaming the Onett sign to Ponyvile) this results in things like paved road ways and ponies driving around in cars, which has never been in the show itself.
  • EarthBound Beginnings supposedly takes place in The '80s, and while there is some stuff that is relevant for the time such as pay phones, ATMs, and transit trains, a lot of the setting is notably far more rural in many areas and certain house designs look very old and dated, to the point it somehow feels more like a mishmash between The '80s and The Gay '90s.
  • Ryzom technically averts this, but the fact that the game has guns in a world where the only metal to be found for miles around is in the hands of a Higher-Tech Species from off-world invokes this feeling.
  • Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped has the Coco levels where you can ride around galleons in the Caribbean on a jet-ski. Also, there's the mummies armed with flamethrowers.
  • Overlaps with Purely Aesthetic Era in the Dark Parables. The detective usually arrives for her cases in a horse-drawn carriage or a boat; the most prominent science seen in the games is alchemy; and the attire of the characters the detective meets is hard to pin down to any one particular time period. At the same time, however, the detective herself wears leather jackets and gloves, and receives her instructions from Mission Control via tape recorder. Possibly justified by the idea that fairy tales are meant to be timeless.
  • Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has several examples of this. Explorers during Egyptian times, robotic bulls during the western time, pilots during the Mayan time, and humans (Zombies) co-existing with dinosaurs during the Jurassic time (Speaking of Jurassic, some dinosaurs from different dinosaur eras). Taken a step further with Piñata parties and Modern Day, where all the previously mentioned also takes place.
  • Pony Island: Since the game is set in Limbo, time and space has no meaning. The Arcade machine has an old style curved CRT monitor, the graphics look like something from Atari or Calico, the desktop looks like Windows95, and the machine prints out arcade tickets. Then there is the fact that the player is a Crusader from the 1200's who's able to operate a computer.
  • Bayonetta:
    • Cereza's mother sang to her "Fly Me To The Moon", even though she lived hundreds of years ago and the song was written in 1954.
    • Flashback segments show that the witches of that age had fully automatic pistols and high-caliber muskets, somehow.
  • Used deliberately in Pirates Vikings and Knights. Aside from the three playable teams, there are also a few other anachronisms, such as a map set in Egyptian Ruins, another set in a Mayincatec Temple, and a modern-day nightclub and a medieval European castle on a Caribbean island.
  • The Talos Principle: Features like computer terminals, powered turrets and electrical switches among the ruins of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and medieval structures. Justified in the sense this is just a virtual world. And considering the state of the real world at that point, everything in the game is relatively anachronistic anyway.
  • Consciously done in Guenevere to reflect the preexisting Anachronism Stew that is the modern conception of Arthurian Legend. 14th-century plate mail coexists with 17th-century style alchemy and 1st-century Roman soldiers.
  • MechWarrior Living Legends - set in the BattleTech universe - has in-universe anachronism. Living Legends ostensibly takes place during a conflict between the Inner Sphere and the Clans, but features technology and Humongous Mecha designs that didn't enter serial production until decades after the Clan ceasefire, and on the field players can pilot mechs and tanks that have been obsolete for just as long. The developers justified this as being for the sake of gameplay rather than canonical accuracy.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight, like Batman (1989), Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: The Brave and the Bold before it, invokes this as it features 1980s police cars and uniforms, taxis from the 1960s, other cars from the 1970s, 1930s-1940s art deco buildings, 1940s-1950s clothing, and modern assault weapons and drones.
  • The Elder Scrolls accomplishes this by having architecture, weapons, armor, fashion, and other items from different time periods, ranging from Antiquity (the Imperials of Cyrodiil are inspired by the Romans) through to the Middle Ages (the Viking-esque Nords of Skyrim) and the Renaissance (the English/French Bretons of High Rock) all the way up to the 1800's (the Babylonian Steampunk Dwemer, the Clockwork City of Sotha Sil, and Sheogorath's pocket watch). All of this is combined into a universe that is, for the most part (at least on the surface), a classic Medieval European Fantasy setting with High Fantasy elements.
  • Salt and Sanctuary: Happens In-Universe on the island the game is set on, with actual locations from the setting that are seem to be perfectly reproduced, frozen in the moment just after an enormous tragedy befell each one. And none of them match each other in terms of time; a Ziggurat recent enough to have worshiped the New Gods, where the Sun King lost his mind to paranoia lies right above a Northern temple, an extremely ancient one, where the Executioner King and his son both lost their lives squabbling over the Artifact of Doom that was the King's axe. The Castle of Storms, where once a mighty king ruled until his court sorcerors hatched a misguided coup that doomed the entire kingdom, leads right into the Red Hall of Cages, an actual place that is only decades old at most, and is implied to still exist, all the way back in Askaria which is nowhere near the island in question. Every place was cribbed wholesale from another time period, ranging from thousands of years ago to relatively contemporary, and the various NPCs wonder if this is the work of some mad architect. It's the Nameless God at work, copying these locations from the memories of those shipwrecked sacrifices sent to him over the years, apparently selected by level of tragedy and level of despair they'd induce on future sacrifices. He doesn't seem to be able to create anything from scratch, but his dead and enslaved sacrifices provide him with more than enough material.
  • Oh...Sir!! The Insult Simulator features a Hipster who plays video games and mentions William Shakespeare releasing a new book. Even more oddly, H. P. Lovecraft is alive and well in the present day. Of course, this is Played for Laughs.
  • Granophones are rather commonplace in West of Loathing despite it being set in the 1890s, a time in which audio recording technology was still a relatively new thing. And that's not even going into the fact that the game shows many characteristics of a wild west setting despite those dating back to the 1860s, not the 1890s. But then again, this game is set in the same fantasy world as Kingdom of Loathing (you know, the one that uses meat as a currency and is not even an actual planet, it's an asteroid with two moons), so this actually kind of Justified.
  • Western Front 1914, as the name implies, took place in 1914, during the First World War... and contains giant robots and laser guns. It's Final Boss is also a Captain Ersatz of Megatron (specifically based on his likeness from the live-action Michael Bay films) for no reason other than just because.
  • Cuphead: Happens in the battle with Sally Stageplay. The "play" in her battle starts out rather normally for the time period, but in her third phase, she "transforms" into what is essentially a JRPG final boss. So despite the game taking place in a 1930's cartoon, her play manages to reference games that would come out about six decades later.
  • The Inheritance DLC for Layers of Fear, which is set sometime in the early 20th century, has a major segment revolving around Mr. Scooter, a little cat toy that the child protagonist loves. However, Mr. Scooter is a real toy (albeit with a different name, "Cool Cat") that was released in 1999.
  • Has-Been Heroes takes place in a medieval setting, but one of your allies can be a wrestler or a robot. In addition, some of the items you find include defibrillators and cell phones, amongst other oddities. Many enemies wield equipment unfit for the time period as well, such as disco balls.
  • Runescape features humans that still use torches and candles to light their homes... meanwhile, the cave goblins under Lumbridge have lightbulbs, and constructed a train line between their city and the dwarven capital of Keldagrim. Dwarves already have an extensive mine cart network that spans a good part of the main continent, and have a functioning blast furnace. Gnomes have developed an advanced glider network that might as well be airplanes, hot air balloons exist, and elves developed what amounts to an RPG Launcher... that they use to dye sheep various colors. The Dragonkin were performing genetic experiments before most of these races even learned what a rune was. Even so, humans are making advances in other areas, such as developing cheesecakes. Then the Sixth Age happens, and an enterprising dwarf manages to harness divine energy, giving birth to the Invention skill, which allows you to make even more Schizo Tech.
  • Red Dead Redemption 2, set in 1899, has a mix of culture, technology, and society ranging from all over the latter half of the 19th century through the first few decades of the 20th century. To note specific examples:
    • Texas Hold'em being the go-to version of poker. While it's possible that Texas Hold'em was invented by 1899 (the history of the game is rather obscure), it didn't become popular until at least 1925. Five/Seven Card Stud or straight draw poker would have been the go-to card games of the era.
    • The available firearms are an odd mix of guns which would have been obsolete for decades and guns not even invented yet in real life. For example, the Volcanic pistol was an obscure museum piece outdated even before the Civil War while the Carbine Repeater (modeled after the real life Spencer Carbine) is about 30 years past its prime by 1899. Meanwhile, the Semi-Auto Shotgun (modeled on the real life Browning Auto-5) was patented in 1898 but wouldn't be produced until 1902, with the in-game being a post-1950 example based on the reload animationnote . The Maxim machine guns are Model 1908s, here appearing nine years too early.
    • The Carcano Rifle is based on the Carcano 91/38. The "91" stands for 1891, but the "38" stands for 1938. The actual Carcano 91 was a much longer rifle than the in-game model, which is copied directly from the infamous "Lee Harvey Oswald" version. The Oswald connection explains why the Carcano is only available as a sniper rifle, despite the actual Carcano 91 being relatively inaccurate for its type. It is also an Italian weapon, and finding even a period-appropriate Italian rifle (such as the Modello) in the American west would have been extremely unlikely.
    • Shotgun ammunition appears in metallic cartridges, which were more expensive, heavier, and fell out of favor following the introduction of paper shotgun cartridges in 1877.
    • While pre-rolled cigarettes were available in 1899, hand-rolling cigarettes was by far the more popular method of the era. It wouldn't be until World War I (where the easier-to-ship pre-rolled cigarettes were included in solder's rations) and the subsequent advertising boom of the 1920s that pre-rolled cigarettes took over.
    • The "Open Range" era quickly came to an end with the invention of barbed wire in the 1870s and was all but completely dead by 1890. Barbed wire is extremely rare in the game and farmers leading herds of sheep through open land is a common random encounter.
    • Telegraph (and even some telephone) poles and lines were much more common in real-life 1899 than what is depicted in the game. They would have run along pretty much every railroad track and most major roads.
    • Milton and Ross introduce themselves as Pinkerton agents acting as lawmen on behalf of the U.S. government. This arrangement was common in the 1870s and 80s, but had been made illegal by 1899.
    • By 1899, bison were reduced to a tiny population while wolves were intentionally hunted to extinction in the real life analogues of the in-game locations where they spawn. Both, especially the wolves, are plentiful in-game. (Conservation and re-introduction efforts have brought both species back in modern times.)
    • While wood-burning 1870s-style locomotives could still be found in the West, especially on short and narrow-gauge lines, most locomotives by 1899 were coal-burners of more modern design. Oddly, the locomotives in RDR2 are still more modern than those in the first game, which is set in 1911.
    • In Chapter 6, it is possible to overhear Dutch talking to himself at camp where he seems to be running through a game of chess in his mind. He mutters "ah, yes, White to d4," which is the Algebraic Notation of for describing chess moves. However, that system of notation didn't become popular until the 1980s. During the era of the game, Descriptive Notation would have been used instead. (Ex. "White Queen's Knight 4".) As a Genius Bonus, the move Dutch describes is the first in a strategy known as the "Dutch Defense".
    • The KKK can be encountered, but the original incarnation of the Klan had died out in the early 1870s, long before the game starts in 1899, and wouldn't be revived until the release of The Birth of a Nation (1915).
    • During the "Oh Brother" stranger quest, one of the brothers calls the other a gerbil as an insult. Gerbils were largely unknown outside their natural habitats before the 1950s.
    • The word "moron" is used as an insult several times. Not only was the term first coined by Henry H. Goddard in 1910, but the word's derogatory connotations are even more recentnote .
  • MORDHAU: Acknowledged and done deliberately by the devs, who made the setting's time and locations vague enough to individually justify weapons and armor from multiple different periods in what one usually calls medieval history. It's not that noticeable in actual gameplay since other games have done worse, and if you know where everything comes from it's just a chance to pit period against period for the sake of a cool battle.
  • Bully has a genius use for this trope. The game, being set in a school and town where you play as a 15 year old kid, has many contradictory clues as to when the game takes place, with technology from the current day such as laptops being present, but also cars that look like cars from the 60s or 70s, the presence of the Greasers, a clique that's based entirely on the greaser culture from the 50s, the school's very retro feel and many, many dates that appear around on posters and banners, such as 2007, 1975 and etc. The reason why this is done is very deliberate, because Rockstar Games wanted to make the game feel nostalgic for whoever played it regardless of their age, by having elements of pretty much every single time period, from the 50s all the way to the 2000s.
  • Cell to Singularity: Evolution Never Ends: Due to the nature of upgrades, it's very much possible to skip things that would have likely came out before a reached time period. For example, you can get to the Industrial Revolution without inventing music, or have computers before television.
  • Farnham Fables: The first game starts off in a seemingly-medieval setting with a castle, king, and princes... and a doll of Freya from Final Fantasy IX. Then the King starts telling a story about his sons going on an adventure... which begins at a bus stop. Then the princes visit a village of native Lizard Folk... one of whom speaks in hippie slang. However, Episode 2 immediately makes it clear that the setting is actually the modern day, and that the Farnham royal family are the unusually old-fashioned ones, making this a Subverted Trope.
  • The primary setting of Princess Connect, Landsol, is a fantasy kingdom vaguely based on Medieval Europe... that also happens to contain gatling guns, Video Games, and Giant Robots.
  • The Shantae series seems to be set in an ancient Arabic setting and things like steam power are considered rare...and yet there are plastic explosives, coffee machines, mecha pirate ships, standard kitchen equipment and even a giant airship.
  • In Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, The Bonebuilders of Skelos Badlands live like cavemen but have a video camera.
  • Only the Brave Can Rescue the Kidnapped Princess takes place in a medieval setting, but things such as microwaves, refrigerators, various modern-day food items, Thanksgiving, sunglasses, dentists, credit cards, baseball, football, chainsaws, and televisions are all mentioned or shown to exist.
  • Syberia: The World Before:
    • The city of Vaghen is this in during Kate Walker's segments, combining modern (for 2005) electronics with the various automaton creations by Hans Voralburg and protegees of his father's company, such as the Musical Sqaure used for performances by the city's music academy, the city-wide automaton amphibious tramway, and electromechanical computers capable of accessing the Internet.
    • As the story progresses into World War II proper, the Voralburg family is shown to have leant their expertise to the Allied war effort, such as designing a pneumatic telegraph for use by British Intelligence as well as a portable clockwork antenna, originally made pre-war, which is compatible with Allied radio transceivers.
  • Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis plays with this as a game mechanic. Some visitors to your park will appreciate the exhibits more if they don’t blend dinosaurs from different places and times.
  • COVID '99: Paddle Royale: The game is set in 1999, yet computers can send a computer virus known as "Covid" and kill people through the World Wide Web with it.
  • Toy Story 3: Justified in the Toy Box mode, where multiple different set pieces that normally have absolutely nothing to do with each other come together. After all, you're just combining all of a child's collection of playsets together, which is what most kids do with their toys to begin with.
  • Like a Dragon: Ishin!:
    • While Mahjong was around in China at this time, it's rise to popularity in Japan and the codification of the Riichi ruleset featured in the game were the better part of a century away.
    • Karaoke manages to show up. Somehow.
    • Apparently Don Quijote, again, somehow, exists in feudal Japan. In a small nod to realism, it's logo has been reworked in hiragana.
  • Despite supposedly taking place in ancient Thebes, Oedipus in my Inventory shows the city containing skyscrapers, medieval castles, log cabins with glass windows, and shepherds with sunglasses.
  • Nobody Saves the World: The setting mixes together High Fantasy wizards and witches, medieval knights, Nuclear Mutants, an alien spaceship, robots, and Magitek.


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