Shown Their Work / Video Games

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• 1893: A World's Fair Mystery contains a wealth of information on the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Not only is everything in the game described in detail, but most things have period photographs in the sidebar and you can look up additional info on some of the important things in the guidebook.
• Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown's plot revolves around a Space Elevator, and the producers of the game have consulted with an actual Japanese company that plans to build a space elevator (most likely Obayashi Corporation) to ensure that the game's depiction is accurate to real life.
• Age of Empires:
  • Age of Empires I allows you to click on any unit, piece of rock, shrub etc — then expand into an encyclopedic background history of said unit/rock/shrub. From a longboat to an elm tree, every item was meticulously mapped out in depth. The game's manual also had historical information on the civilizations themselves, including when they ruled, their rise and fall, their economy, religion and battle tactics. In addition to the expansion's manual doing this, the edges of the pages had factoids for anything ranging from Roman Shield Wall tactics to the earliest discovered human tools.
  • Age of Empires II dedicates a large portion of the manual to historical information on every single unit, building and technology available in the game, as well as an extensive in-game encyclopedia of the various civilizations, events, technologies and other historical information on the middle ages.
  • Age of Mythology has a massive in-game encyclopaedia with some pretty in-depth descriptions dedicated to the mythological creatures, as well as all soldiers, buildings, heroes, monsters, trees, animals, technologies and pretty much everything that can be selected. Right down to listing not just the names of the original Valkyries, but what each name meant. Fictional characters (that is, those invented specifically for the game) and joke units have corresponding descriptions, but the rest are pretty accurate.
• Alone in the Dark: The flavor text in Illumination was written by someone who seems to have at least played through the original games, as they contain specific plot details that don't appear on the Wikipedia page.
• Apotheon is a 2D action platformer embedded entirely within the world of Greek Myth, and scattered throughout the map are plaques featuring texts detailing Greek myth.
• Arknights:
  • Ptilopsis and Silence not only look a lot like the owls they were based on, but they also have orange eyes, which is a real trait possessed by both of their owl species.
  • Some of the firearms used by the operators are actually based on real-life models◊.
  • There are plenty of medical terms and concepts inserted into the setting and dialogue, some major and easily noticeable such as the Hippocratic Oath in Rhodes Island's motto, to minor stuff like Kal'tsit mentioning "rubor, hypothermia, necrosis, and frostbite" after inspecting corpses on Chapter 4.
  • The Chinese words used in signs in Lungmen are correct, which would not be surprising if one knows the Chinese origins of the developers. However, the cyrillic words concerning Ursus and their operators (Gummy is a special case) are also without error.
• ARK:
  • Heavily Played With in ARK: Survival Evolved. The game takes many liberties with the design of its prehistoric creatures^note Most of which is a mix of Rule of Cool and Rule of Fun, but it also does take the latest research on the field of paleontology in accord. A good example is Spinosaurus. Fossil evidence in 2014 shows Spinosaurus had very short hindlegs, as opposed to its popular depiction of having long hind legs typical of carnivorous dinosaurs. Ark is probably one of the first dinosaur-related media to portray the creature in the new short-legged depiction. ^note Although the game depicts it as a full-blown quadruped, which is controversial. A TLC update gave Spino a stance system, allowing it to switch between a swifter quadruped mode and a more powerful upright mode. Yet, Ark also fails in other aspects like having some dinosaurs such as Utahraptor being largely scaly (yet the Troodon, Megalosaurus, and Therizinosaurus have feathers) and almost all the dinosaurs having the wrong wrists^note This may seem like a very minor detail to the uninformed, but dinosaur wrists face out to the sides rather than up and front like a human (or old dinosaur books). Their wrists would break if they were positioned like a human.
    • The sheer existence of Yutyrannus in ARK, given that the genus was first identified in 2012.
    • Most of ARK's pterosaurs have pycnofibers, a hairy coat analogous to fur or feathers but distinct from both.
    • Although Utahraptor is mostly scaly, the Deinonychus introduced with the Valguero map is fully feathered, has correctly jointed wrists, and uses a unique "latching" combat mechanic consistent with current theories about how they would have hunted larger prey.
  • ARK 2:
    • The Tyrannosaurus in the announcement trailer is portrayed as being very slightly feathered. While there is still an ongoing debate over whether Tyrannosaurus had feathers, the spots where it has feathers don't conflict with any skin impressions recorded in the fossil record.
    • The Pteranodon in the announcement trailer are shown taking off by vaulting with their wings, although the previous game got this right. Unlike in the previous game, however, its wing structure is accurate, with the membrane supported by only one long finger and the tips being rounded.
    • The raptors in the second trailer are shown with a body coat of feathers, rather than being predominantly scaly as in the original game. They also have their second and third fingers fused, something media often forgets.
    • Both the Tyrannosaurus and raptors have non-pronated hands.
    • Unlike in the last game, Smilodon will be correctly depicted with a short tail, a stocky body, and a more machairodont-like skull according to the concept art.
    • The concept art of Carnotaurus shows it with its osteoderms distributed throughout its body, as per recent scientific discoveries, rather than being limited to its back.
    • While the concept art of Ankylosaurus still shows it with spikes protruding from its body and tail club as in the last game, its armor is correctly portrayed as a really tough hide embedded with bony osteoderms rather than a Studded Shell.
    • Brachiosaurus is correctly shown with spines along its back and the underside of its neck, and its nostrils located on its snout instead of the top of its head.
• Assassin's Creed is a franchise that is known for using conspiracy theories as an Excuse Plot for Historical Fiction. The games generally make use of a lot of Dated History information, but places all of it in a background and map that is heavily researched, with correct period architecture, general layout and a broadly accurate chart of historical events and figures, although the recent games that are moving closer to contemporary times have had far more Artistic License – History than before.
  • Assassin's Creed put a huge amount of effort into studying the layout of the 12th century cities the characters would be exploring, including a lot of still-recognisable landmarks such as the Dome of the Rock, the Ummayad Mosque, the Citadel and the Masyaf Fortress. Most of the nine targets were real characters that disappeared over the Crusades. Only a couple were believed to have been assassinated. The game also accurately depicts King Richard I with a French accent, since he spent all his life in the Angevin territories of France.
  • Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood are a virtual tour of the Italian Renaissance as Ezio meets a virtual who's who of that era. Likewise, every important or noteworthy location in the various cities has a small database entry that you can view when near that person/place. They're not needed for completing the game, nor are they required for any reason at all, but they're interesting to read and sometimes contain funny/snarky commentary. Extensive attention to detail was paid to depicting Florence and Venice, with several players and their friends/families commenting on how they'd visited those very locations in real life only to find them accurately (for the time) replicated in the game.
  • Istanbul and Cappadocia, as we see it rendered in Assassin's Creed: Revelations is also very impressive, though the game includes some anachronisms like the Hagia Sophia having minarets before its period of installation and Cappadocia being traveled by sea.
  • It's one thing to include accurate Italian dialogue in a videogame. It's another thing to include lots of accurate Mohawk dialogue as spoken by native Mohawk speakers, as they do in Assassin's Creed III. Likewise, over 80% of the characters appearing in the game were real, historical people. And as expected by now, the in-game database is both extensive and detailed and the environments beautifully, accurately rendered. The DLC The Tyranny of King Washington, featured George Washington as an Alternate Universe Evil Overlord, and the real Washington was once asked by a contingent to become King of America but Washington refused. You can say that the game overdramatized this decision, but the inspiration comes from an accurate nod to U.S. history.
  • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag took great licenses in depicting naval combat and made piracy far more violent than it really was, but the game was praised for its highly well researched and accurate portrayal of the Nassau Republic, and correctly portraying the pirates as A Lighter Shade of Gray. It's DLC Freedom Cry was praised for its intelligence in portraying slavery in Haiti.
  • Assassin's Creed: Unity: While criticized for its great historical liberties taken with The French Revolution, it is nonetheless praised for its accurate reproduction of Parisian monuments, with Notre Dame cathedral being recreated 1:1 (i.e. the game render has the same proportion as the real building).
  • Assassin's Creed Syndicate likewise was praised for its recreation of London, with many English residents and tourists noting that they were able to navigate the map as per their daily routine.
  • Even some of the game's most outrageous inventions and gimmicks have some basis in fact. Leonardo's War Machines in Brotherhood were based on his actual designs, as were the flying machine and parachutes.
  • Assassin's Creed Origins: The game was praised for its historically accurate look at Egyptian society, politics, and the geography of the region. It even provided a "discovery mode" where you could explore the game world without any quests and learn about the real history. There was, however, one notable exception: Siwa (the protagonist's home town) was historically extremely progressive regarding homosexuality, but this was not so much as hinted at in the game. Considering that this is one of the things Siwa has been most famous for for literally thousands of years, it's a rather glaring omission.
• Astro Boy: Omega Factor for the GBA sets itself up as prime Adaptation Distillation through this trope, including as many characters from the original works as narratively possible, along with an extended character biography section, which includes information about their first appearances, and logical justifications for any changes that have been made for their appearance in the game.
• CyberConnect2 and Asura's Wrath, most definitely: This page describes the extensive amounts of Buddhist symbolism in the game, and inspirations for its visuals. Just for example, the way the Demigods are injured is made to resemble the damage done to old Buddhist gilt lacquer statues.
  • The Second and The third parts get even more specific.
• DICE went above and beyond with their research for Battlefield 1, and it shows in almost every element of the game. The game's maps, soldiers and weapons are all highly detailed and extremely accurate to the real thing, even down to the movements of the guns firing, tread patterns from tanks, and real-life landmarks. The loading screens for each match feature different factoids about the war, and loading up the game on certain days will produce a screen detailing an actual WWI event or battle from the exact day. Topping it off, the game also contains a 279-entry Codex (with each entry unlockable during gameplay) detailing every different aspect of WWI that was featured in the game. For a sequel to an FPS series published by a company infamous for catering to the lowest common denominator, it's impressive how eager the game is to teach players about actual history.
• BattleTech (2018) is surprisingly full of little nods towards how real-world physics would work in the setting.
  • The game acknowledges that worlds without an atmosphere are even worse for heat dissipation than worlds such as deserts. You need a medium to pass the heat through and away from the reactor, and without air, heat sinks are barely effective.
  • The PPC class of weapon is an energy weapon, like lasers, but deals stability damage like a ballistic or missile weapon. This is because it fires charged particles, which have a discrete mass to hit someone with.
  • Lasers are inherently more accurate due to the effectively instantaneous speed of light they travel at, but they don't do stability damage because they ablate armor by melting it rather than ripping it off with some kind of explosive or physical force.
  • Autocannons of all size produce recoil, but it takes training to control it (subsequent shots become increasingly inaccurate) and the autocannons themselves all produce one 'unit' of recoil when fired, regardless of size. This is because the large-bore autocannons are also physically heavier, and better able to absorb the recoil they produce.
  • 'Mechs without hands have to resort to kicks for melee attacks, and they accurately drop their arms to balance out a kick.
• Every category of angel in the Bayonetta series is designed exactly as it's described in the Bible. In addition, all the little intros that play when you meet an enemy for the first time lists their category and where they fall in the hierarchy.
• The Big City Adventure series has a wide variety of interesting facts about tourist attractions in cities from San Francisco to Tokyo. Similarly, 80s edutainment game Are We There Yet? gave basic facts about two mostly-obscure tourist attractions for every state in the US.
• The events of BioShock Infinite — a flying city, cybernetics, alternate universes — may be fanciful, but the game absolutely nails the attitudes and prejudices of late 19th/early 20th century America, from the religion to work to money. Despite the fact that it takes place in an Alternate Universe, a lot of the information it gives is accurate to how people from that time would explain it.
• Black Mesa, a remake of the first Half-Life, takes great care in depicting accurate scientific formulas and diagrams on the whiteboards in the labs of the titular facility, averting the E = MC Hammer overtones of the source material. Additionally, the HECU are much more consistent in their depiction as a branch of the United States Marine Corps; they employ LAV-25s and AV-8B Harrier IIs instead of Half-Life's M2 Bradleys and F-16s, respectively, and in the retail release they correctly refer to their medics as corpsmen, with one marine even calling his superior "gunny", an informal nickname for gunnery sergeants in the Marine Corps.
• The opening cutscene for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night mentions that the first Demonic Invasion took place in the midst of the Laki eruption of 1783. While there obviously was no invasion of demons in Real Life, the Laki eruption is a real historical event that took place over the course of June 1783–February 1784.
• In the Brothers in Arms series, the games show off an incredible amount of historical documents in their extras section, on-site photo of rural France areas (and comparison between their own in-game buildings and their real life counterparts). The military advisor for Gearbox Software is a retired veteran general.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, the first in particular, are very accurate in capturing the look, feel, and humor of the series. Numerous references, Call Backs, and Call Forwards are used, as are most of the voice actors.
• The Call of Duty series tends to focus on real historical military operations. Even the entirely fictional Modern Warfare inserted some historical realism by using real buildings and structures featured in a level set in Pripyat, in the Chernobyl evacuation zone, and factoring them into the gameplay. After sniping Imran Zakhaev from the top floor of the Pripyat hotel which had been infiltrated in the previous level, the player and his spotter must move through the abandoned city's cultural center and streets, at the end going from the public swimming pool to the Pripyat Ferris wheel where they'll have to hold out until the helicopter's arrival.
• Children of a Dead Earth bills itself as "The most scientifically accurate space warfare simulator ever made.", and it's easy to see why. The developers focus heavily on using real physics for making spaceship equipments and space combat, and provide massive options for players to create equipment using real parameters to tweak their performance to their liking. The developer even has a blog about the science behind the game. The massive focus on realism does come at a cost, however: the developer's decision to stick with functioning technologies (and ones that have enough detailed information so players can tinker with them) does mean that more speculative technologies like fusion power and engine, some proposed fission reactor type like the fission fragment reactor and drive, various radiator designs under study like droplet radiators, or classified technologies like nuclear shaped-charge (so no Orion Drive or Casaba Howitzer, the weaponized version of Orion bombs), bomb-pumped laser or particle beams (which is due to classified research and limited study in its damage effect) are being left out.
• The Civilization series featured a similar database in its Civilopedia.
  • The Civs themselves are all designed to play like their real life counterparts and try to encompass multiple historical features. They also have a tendency of averting Small Reference Pools and including Civs that would only be known by major history buffs at best. Even some of the Civs' AI behavior (In Civ V, Zulu would tend to attack with the Bull Horn formation. In Civ VI, America tends to be expansive, but only to his Continent and heaven help you if you cause trouble. Even the "joke" about Mahatma Gandhi being nuke happy can come off as this, as India's real life nuclear program is more of a defensive measure with a "second-strike only" policy, which is what you would expect from a pacifist who's limited to a small empire.)
  • In Civilization IV, Tanks are conspicuously capable of learning siege promotions; this is due to the fact that the vehicle they're modeled off of, the M4 Sherman, had a 105 mm gun variant capable of using its gun as an indirect fire weapon, a tactic used to great effect on the Western Front of World War II.
• Club Penguin: The Pteranodon from the Prehistoric Parties is quadrupedal on the ground like real pterosaurs, it is toothless, and its wing is supported by a long finger. The 2014 party featured a Deinonychus-like raptor with feathers.
• COD 2 Spanish Civil War Mod: Despite having limited resources and being unpaid for their work, the modding team put much effort into making the game look and feel as historically accurate as possible. Even having only rudimentary knowledge about the history of the Spanish Civil War, you will appreciate the uniform and weapon design shown in the game, as well as various historical locations closely resembling their real-life counterparts.
• In Coffee Talk, the lunar cycle is accurate to that of real life, since there is a full moon on October 2, 2020, the night Gala turns into a wolf during his Fury. Episode 2 also has an accurate lunar cycle, with the full moon on September 29, 2023.
• Developers of Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars contacted MIT students for input on the propagation of the new, self-replicating strain of Tiberium, and even have a mocked-up scientific paper on the subject.
• In The Conduit, there was a crapload of research to find all of the conspiracy theories that were used to tie the story together.
  • Similarly, the Washington, D.C. settings in the game are duplicated with surprising fidelity, down to the signage for the Metro subway system.
• As far as remakes and remasters go, Vicarious Visions did an absolutely incredible job of this with Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. Despite being built from the ground up, much of the game comes very close to what the originals were like, if not exactly capturing how the original game was. This goes doubly so for Stormy Ascent, in which the team reportedly played the level over and over again in order to prepare for designing it for the remaster and The High Road, where the Good Bad Bug of being able to run on the ropes of the bridge and easily bypass 90% of what would otherwise be That One Level is replicated. Even with the new features added in, it still does the original justice. So much justice, in fact, the original creators of Crash Bandicoot, Naughty Dog, gave overwhelmingly positive feedback on it.
• By the end of the Wii survival horror game Cursed Mountain, you'll probably know all about the Tibetan afterlife.
• The Dead Space series features a whole lot of implausible Eldritch Abominations that are more about being terrifying than realistic, but it's still very clear that the writers understand, at minimum, both how plasma works as a mining tool and how creatures underneath a Hive Mind operate. It also has a terrifyingly accurate portrayal of PTSD in the later games.
  • Each of the games also understand how sound works in a hard vacuum. Since sound requires a medium to travel across, as in some form of matter like air, liquid or a solid surface, you will only hear what Isaac is in direct contact with. If he's floating, you'll only hear the air thrusters on his suit and the muffled sound of his weapon, but that's it. You'll only hear his footsteps if he's on a hard surface, but nothing else, as well.
• Deus Ex knew its conspiracy theories. Not only is it chock full of every conceivable conspiracy theory from MJ-12 to The Illuminati to aliens at Area 51, but it's also crammed full of real philosophical concepts and ideals, from Santayana to Nietzsche. Visit the AI in Morgan Everett's base if you need a small example of the research involved.
  • The second sequel, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, is filled with evidence that the writers spent a lot of time researching the real life problems associated with cybernetics and offered plausible fictional workarounds for them. Some of the Data Pads you stumble across can be downright educational, and even when straying from fact to fiction it almost all feels very much like a hard science fiction.
• In Dog's Life, you play as a dog named Jake and can control other dogs. A focus point about the game was making sure the dogs act like dogs, instead of the cartoony dogs we're used to. The dogs are quite accurate both in design, size, and behavior. They trot like they should, move like they should, and generally act like dogs aside from a few Rule of Funny moments.
• The very biggest events in Double Homework revolve around man-made avalanches, and man-made avalanches do happen. Not only that, the avalanche that sent the protagonist and Tamara into PTSD could have been caused in the way it was described. Furthermore, Rachel’s comment about how the avalanche could have happened anyway had the protagonist and Tamara not forced the cable car door open also rings true.
• Driver: San Francisco: The series villain, Jericho, attempts to get his hands on platinum and ammonia. While Tanner is baffled as to why, a chemist is called up to find that platinum's a catalyst that can create hydrogen cyanide when ammonia is passed over it. If you knew what you were doing of course.
• Westwood Studios' Dune II and Emperor: Battle for Dune depart heavily from the Duniverse with regards to storyline, factions and characterization. That said, the dialogue in particular is so chock full of tiny references and nods to the books that one gets the feeling that with all the liberties taken, the makers still knew the books by heart.
  • They also managed to replicate David Lynch's style to a tee during cutscenes.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara exhibits Capcom paying respect to the source material, mixing elements of the TTRPG with Capcom's tried-and-true Beat 'em Up gameplay while incorporating the original source material's lore.
• Dwarf Fortress is probably the only game in existence for which a geology textbook is a good substitute for a strategy guide (for the most part). The steps for creating alloys and certain types of glass are also 100% accurate, and most existing abstractions are temporary or deliberate.
  • If you look at the game files, it actually accounts for the specific heat of rocks and metals. (Some of which are actually wrong as of the current version, but will be fixed with the next release.) Talk about science!
  • Temperature has been implemented. Toady is now working on developing a magic system and making your livestock require food, and has indicated a longer-term goal of fixing the economy mechanics to account for things like supply/demand and inflation.
• Much like Dwarf Fortress, the makers of Subnautica have taken the time to check their metallurgy — to an understandably lesser extent — silver ore is a component of lead, which reflects the possibility of using galena (a silver-bearing ore) as a source of lead, something that Jacksepticeye finds odd.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Sabre Cats encountered throughout Skyrim are designed with bodies more similar to bears than cats. However, this actually counts as a Genius Bonus on part of the developers; Fossil records show that the genus Smilodon had bear-like bodies far stockier than modern cats, with the most accepted theory being that this was an adaptation to take down larger prey like mammoths — and mammoths also live in Skyrim.
  • Virtually all of the various forts encountered across Skyrim are at important road intersections or other locations of strategic value.
  • A majority of the cities and larger towns are located on or near a waterway connecting to a large river or the ocean like they would most be in a real life civilization with Tamriel's level of technology.
  • A 2022 article on IGN tells of how a scientist used facial reconstruction technology on the skeletons that pop up as enemies from time to time. Not only did they turn out to look very similar to a caveman, but Jonah Lobe, the Bethesda dev who designed the skeleton, revealed that this had been the intent from the get-go:
  I wanted them to look thuggish, thick-jawed, thick-browed and sort of Neanderthal-like. … Since they were going to be attacking the player I wanted them to look intimidating but not with those meanie-eyes you see on so many fantasy skeletons. The answer, for me, was to go heavy with the brows and big with the teeth.
  • Quite possibly the most impressive example of this, however, is with Skyrim's mineral make-up. As pointed out elsewhere, Skyrim is geologically accurate. Minerals most commonly occur in regions where they would naturally form. For example, gold is found in the Reach (where there's lots of compression and mountain-building), while iron is found in Whiterun (where there's lots of metamorphism).
• The Endless Ocean series is absolutely loaded with heavily researched information about all manner of sea life. Just about every single animal you interact with comes with a load of provided information, even the most obscure and little-known deep-sea life to common and unimpressive inch-long reef fish get at least one page worth of information about their feeding habits, biology and other quirks of their behavior if the player decides they want to learn about them.
• The second installment of the Enigmatis trilogy of supernatural mystery games, The Mists of Ravenwood, includes accurate information about the redwood forests and specific trees of noteworthy size. (The game is set in the redwood forests of California.) After the main game is completed, players of the collector's edition can read the "Redwood Encyclopedia" in the Extras tab, and learn a number of interesting facts about the trees.
• Epic Mickey is built on this. The secondary protagonist hasn't had a film appearance in 70 years (neither has one of the villains, Dr. XXX), your allies the Gremlins haven't even been in a finished Disney film, and even things as insignificant as the barrels are based on Disney history.
  • Plus, anybody who's spent enough time at Disneyland can navigate a lot of the locations from memory, since the game takes place in a Crapsack World version of Disneyland.
• Silicon Knights redid a level in Eternal Darkness because they found out that stained glass didn't exist in the time period it took place in.
• Eternal Sonata has, between chapters, historical accounts of Chopin's life, with real life photographs of scenery in the background.
• Europa Universalis (the third one at least) is both played straight and subverted. Go to Europe, and you find an amazingly accurate map of 1400s Europe, complete with a plethora of Holy Roman Empire one-province minor nations. Go to Asia, and you find a Japan that is not only consistently unified from 1399 to 1821, but lumped into an "East Asian" (whatever that means) culture group with China and Korea. You can tell why it's called Europa Universalis.
  • Even in Europe, though, there are errors — Hungary is included in the "West Slavic" culture group, and a few things are changed for balance reasons.
  • There are many game mods that help fix most of the inaccuracies, most notably Magna Mundi (which is made of Shown Their Work).
• The person who made Hymmnos for Ar tonelico put some seriously extreme effort at making a language. See here.
• The Evil Goddess Route in Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force uses as a plot point and includes a detailed explanation in dialogue in a sub-event of a psychological tactic known as the door-in-the-face technique. Specifically, the Septerion Club uses a powerful "wine" as an addictive drug and tries to get people to take out a massive loan to buy it at an insanely high price. However, those that can't afford it / won't go for it are lured to a much cheaper version of the wine available in supermarkets that is nevertheless more expensive than would be if not for the psychological warfare.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout, particularly, features this trope, as well as lampshading the setting's resident mutants; many are specifically assumed to be artificial. Sufficient (and rewarding) exploration reveals a detailed and clear description of how a mutagenic artificial virus designed to combat biological warfare interferes with the anaphase stage of cell division; this is, in many ways, the single most unrealistic and fantastic element of this plot point, but the game clearly takes its biology very seriously. Well, up to a point. This was also the game that began its manual with three pages on the precise effects, graded by the scale of the bomb, of a nuclear detonation. Biology wasn't the only thing Fallout took seriously.
  • When Bethesda Studios took over the production of Fallout 3, they based it in Washington, D.C.. Their studios are based in a suburb of Washington, DC (Bethesda, Maryland; yes, we know, not a very creative name). This is why the landscape is so detailed: they know the area. Gamers based in the DC metro area noticed and praised Bethesda for it.
    • This◊ is a map of the real Washington, D.C. subway system. This is a map of the Fallout 3 version. The game wasn't meant to be perfect in its representation of D.C. (the real National Mall is much, much larger than the in-game version, for example, and there's a practical explanation for that), but Bethesda nailed little details beautifully, right down to the architectural styles of random buildings. Please pay a visit to D.C. and then go back to play the game. Scenery Porn.
    • Actually, Bethesda was founded in Bethesda, but has since moved to nearby Rockville (still in the D.C. suburbs). The attention to detail isn't just in the map, take a look at the western horizon in the game. Those gently rolling mountains don't just look like the Appalachian and Blue Ridge...
  • Fallout: New Vegas: Caesar's Legion, full stop. Their founder and leader, a former New California Republic citizen and member of a society that was dedicated to preserving knowledge in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, explicitly modeled them on the Roman Empire, and he did his homework.
    • He formed the Legion by uniting several tribes and forming them into a militaristic government and state.
    • He compares his conquests in Arizona to the historical Caesar's conquest of Gaul, and his return to conquer the NCR to the crossing of the Rubicon.
    • The Legion not only all speak Latin, but also pronounce it correctly, using only hard Cs and pronouncing Vs as Ws. All but the most educated people west of the Colorado continue to call Caesar "See-zer," but the Legionaries use the historically accurate "Kai-zar."
    • The Legion uses historical Roman Legion ranks and organization, not just the more famous centurions and their centuries, but also more obscure ranks, such as the decanus, commander of the eight-man contubernium.
    • They also portrayed the Frumentarii, Roman 'military intelligence', an organization very rarely mentioned in fiction or popular books about Imperial Rome and usually known only by people interested in ancient history. Sure, the Frumentarii in game are much more sinister than their real-life counterparts (who were more intelligence analysts and tax collectors than secret police) but then again, they had to fit a 'tribal' nature of Ceasar's Legion.
    • They use the denarius silver coin as their currency, as well as the golden aureus, which is worth 25 denarii in-game, just as it was in ancient Rome.
    • They practice historical punishments such as crucifixion and decimation.
    • Similar to how Fallout 3 was modeled after D.C., New Vegas was modeled after the real Mojave Desert, even featuring actual towns such as Goodsprings, Primm and Boulder (known in-game as Boulder City) as well as locations such as Nellis Air Force Base, McCarran Airport (known as Camp McCarran) and Hoover Dam. The wiki devoted to the game is more likely to point out things that aren't right (for example, there's nothing much at the real-life highway intersection where Novac is located in the game, and Solar One is a bit south of that point, rather than north as Helios One is in-game) than things that are.
    • Many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints noted how Fallout: New Vegas is one of the few games ever released to accurately depict the faith, while also managing to parallel real historic events such as the Utah War, Missouri's Mormon Extermination Order, the faith's relationship with Native American populations during the 1800's, and the tragic Mountain Meadows Massacre; all with plenty of careful subtext. Daniel, Bert Gunnarsson and former member of the church Driver Nephi are all given fairly fleshed out roles within the game beyond being stock "Mormon-stereotypes"; and while some may balk at the violent nature of Joshua Graham his reputation as a Badass Preacher armed with the Browning 1911 (the official Utah State gun) and a story mirroring the Bible's Parable of the Prodigal Son still make him a strong fan favorite.
  • Fallout 4 slightly downplays this in comparison to previous games, but it's still clear that Bethesda put a hell of a lot of effort into researching the Boston area when designing the Commonwealth. Just as a few examples, famous historical monuments and landmarks like the Bunker Hill Monument, the Old North Church and Paul Revere Monument, the USS Constitution, Fanuiel Hall, Walden Pond, Fort Independence (now called "The Castle"), Saugus Ironworks, and the Minuteman statue outside of Sanctuary Hills (which is located where Minute Man National Historical Park is in our world) are all where they roughly should be. Most of the differences can be chalked up to either Acceptable Breaks from Reality or examples of how the Fallout Universe is an Alternate History to our own.
    • Because of monetary reasons, many famous locations in the Boston area are replaced with Bland-Name Product versions of their real-world counterparts, but are still placed roughly where they would be in reality. For example, the Salem Witch Museum is instead called "the Salem Museum of Witchcraft," and both Fallon's Basement and Fallon's Department Store are references to Filene's and the associated surplus/overstock bargain store.
    • While Diamond City (located in the real-world Fenway Park) has no references to the Boston Red Sox since Bethesda couldn't afford the rights, many other details from the real-world park are still kept. For example, where the Nuka-Cola sign is located in Diamond City, there's a large Coca-Cola sign in approximately the same location and style in our Fenway Park. Also, the huge scoreboard that the residents of Diamond City revere as "the Wall/Green Guardian" is a real feature of Fenway Park's design, and its actual nickname is "the Green Monster." And if the player character looks up into the bleachers, they can find a single red seat — representing where Ted Williams hit the furthest ball in Fenway Park history, 502 feet from home plate. (As a side note, Bethesda snuck in a Take That! against the Red Sox, since the banners depicting the teams' World Series victories end in 1918, implying that in the Alternate History of the Fallout universe, the Red Sox would not win any of their championships in the early 21st century.)
    • In an interesting example of this, even parts of Boston are accurate despite them no longer being in our world anymore! Aside from Diamond City and Bunker Hill, the only other major settlement in Boston is Goodneighbor, founded in Scollay Square, the city's former red-light district. The Memory Den, which is found in Goodneighbor, has both its facade and marquee heavily based on Gordon's Scollay Square Olympia Theater (although the theater was roughly a block and a half away from where the Memory Den is in the game). Goodneighbor and Scollay Square are (or was, for the latter) centered around the Old State House (which is accurate to our real world), but it features a bar underneath the Old State House called "The Third Rail," based in an old subway station. The Third Rail roughly corresponds to the real world State Station, also based under the Old State House. However, Scollay Square was torn down in our world in 1962, and that evidently never happened in the Fallout Universe. And finally, one of the streets closest to Goodneighbor — Newbury Street — is where Hubris Comics is located. Where Hubris Comics is in Fallout's Boston is roughly where the flagship location of real-world Boston comic book store Newbury Comics is located.
    • In the southeastern part of the Commonwealth, it's possible to find a wrecked Norwegian ship ruled by its now-ghoulified crew, who have degenerated into Raiders in order to survive. While the Norwegian they speak isn't quite perfect, it's surprisingly accurate for the most part. And on a related note, the ghoulified Chinese Captain Zao found aboard the Yangtze in Boston Harbor does fall a bit into Asian Speekee Engrish at times — although this is Justified by him having gone a bit loopy from being stuck in his submarine for ~210 years while the rest of his crew degenerated into Feral Ghouls — the Chinese he speaks is more or less accurate.
    • In a more subtle case, some weapons and gun mods are accurate to their real-world counterparts in ways not often pointed out in other media. For example, suppressors thoroughly avert the Hollywood Silencer trope since even on the quietest guns, they don't totally silence the sound of the bullet. However, suppressors also noticeably reduce a firearm's recoil, which is something not usually noted in other media. And on a related note, while Molotov Cocktails still play Convection, Schmonvection straight since the Sole Survivor doesn't badly burn their hands when holding one by the bottle, actual oil is required to make them effective instead of only using alcohol (like in real life). Molotovs in 4 also, unlike in New Vegas, burn the ground/target for a short time after detonating — just like they do in reality.
    • Related to the above oil comment, most power sources not relying on advanced Pre-War tech (like those seen in the various settlements throughout the Wasteland) will run on oil — but not crude oil, since part of the Fallout Series' backstory establishes that there's virtually no petroleum left in the world. Instead, they run on biodegradable oil a la ethanol (which is also developed in settlements). Also, it's shown that one of the game's main factions, the Institute, is only able to frequently use plastics in their technology (which, on a similar note, are incredibly advanced in part because they utilize transistors, something that the Fallout Universe didn't develop until 2067 before they were quietly ignored and then lost to history because of the Great War) is that they learned how to create synthetic plastics based on Pre-War records of companies like Cambridge Polymer Labs.
  • Fallout 76 is similarly downplayed to make it a little more effective as a multiplayer game, but it's still fairly accurate. When the McElroy brothers, who grew up around the area of West Virginia the game takes place in, played it, they noted that the distances between things on the map are scaled down, but the actual map is pretty accurate.
• Final Fantasy XIV has the Sundrop Dance, a dance performed by the Vanu Vanu beastmen tribe to intimidate their opponents before battle and the player can learn the dance as an emote. The dance is based off the Haka dance that was used by the Māori tribe in New Zealand to show off their strength before entering battle. While some players argue that the female version of the dance in game looks too soft compared to the male version, the real life version of the female's dance is the same in game. Watching certain Vanu Vanu performing the dance shows that both male and female have their own versions.
• Support conversations involving Miriel in Fire Emblem: Awakening tend to involve accurate information on real life scientific phenomena as varied as muscle memory, the relation bewteen the heat of a flame and its color, the effects of a Kiai, and some more.
• Several sword techniques in For Honor include, as cool as they are, actual ones used by knights like half-swording and mordhau.
• Future Tactics features enemies wearing powerful Bulletproof Vests that take a lot of abuse from projectile weapons before going down, yet go down easily to melee attacks. This is based on how, in real life, a Kevlar Ballistic Vest works by preventing the bullet from penetrating the body and distributes the force of it over your entire chest: they will do little to resist blunt blows from a melee weapon, and a knife will slice through the fibers with little difficulty.
• The makers of Gabriel Knight appear to love research more than life itself. While the information is both useful and interesting, you'll be very glad that the game has provided you with a tape recorder that allows you to play back all the conversations that Gabriel has had with various Voodoo experts.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn's summon sequences include several notable corrections to the... erm... liberties they'd taken with the first two games' summons, though most are still quite inaccurate.
  • The Golden Sun series in general is very good at geography and history. Many of the Wacky Wayside Tribes and villages are Fantasy Counterpart Culture versions of real historical places and cultures, with reasonably-authentic architecture, attire, and, if you looked at the stoves/ovens, local cuisine.
  • In 2008, one fan wrote a blog post to discuss Hermetic lore as used by Golden Sun: the principles of the four elements, Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone, the all-seeing eye (The Wise One)... and used additional Hermetic lore to predict with incredible accuracy that a potential sequel's plot could involve powers outside of Alchemy and the four elements, likely derived from celestial objects, such as the sun and moon imagery presented in the first game.
• Even though Grand Theft Auto Online (and the entire Grand Theft Auto series) has a lineup of entirely fake cars (because there's no way Rockstar could get the licenses for real ones) the devs went through the trouble of recording audio of the car doors opening and closing, accurate to those cars' real life counterparts. Probably not a surprise that a game with the word "auto" right in the title has a few car nerds on staff.
• Halo: Despite what the games would have you believe at first glance, the entire universe is well thought out (such as with the workings of all weapons), particularly in the novels.
  • In Halo 3, during "The Ark", the Milky Way is hanging in the sky the whole level. At one point, the Master Chief offhandedly mentions that they're beyond the rim, and 343 Guilty Spark says, "2¹⁸ light-years from galactic center, to be precise." This adds up 262,144 light-years. The Milky Way is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Nerds rejoiced.
  • Of particular note is Halo's method of Faster-Than-Light Travel; the slipstream space. Characters in the Expanded Universe — read: Dr. Halsey — go into exhaustive detail as to how the slipstream functions, where it is in regards to our contemporary perspective, and just how mind-bogglingly weird it is compared to normal space-time.
• Hatoful Boyfriend did their homework on the birds involved, and either incorporates these things into their characterization (Shuu's distinctive Evil Laugh, Oko San failing the mirror test, Anghel's obsession with Faux Symbolism), or simply leaves them as Genius Bonuses for the players who also did their homework (Yuuya's posture is a mating dance).
  • The supernatural elements in Nageki's, Anghel's, and Bad Boys' Love routes are also pretty well researched.
  • The diseases the heroine worries about catching from Shuu are all specifically known to make the jump between birds and humans. A disease in "Bad Boys' Love" specifically has different effects on the different species, being nigh harmless to birds and deadly within minutes to mammals.
• Whether the author of Higurashi: When They Cry is an experienced Mahjong player or just did research about it, all these details make the Mahjong scenes in the series all the more awesome; most readers won't understand a thing about all this "pong" and "riichi" stuff though. There is even a Higurashi Mahjong game called "Higurashi Jan".
• Inazuma Eleven:
  • The Mezozoic Era visited in Chrono Stone mostly avoids Anachronism Stew and Misplaced Wildlife by showing only Late Cretaceous creatures from the Hell Creek Formation. Besides famous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, the only Sauropod shown is Alamosaurus instead of a more famous Jurassic Sauropod like Apatosaurus. And paleontology isn't the main theme in the series.
  • For a fictional pterosaur, Tochan is a very accurate Quetzalcoatlus, having the right size and proportions, a long wing finger, a pteroid bone, plantigrade feet, a head crest, and being mostly quadrupedal on the ground (although he is also able to stand on two legs).
• Infinity: The Quest for Earth features Newtonian flight physics (no Space Friction here!) and includes, within it's procedurally generated 200-400 billion stars, the several dozen thousand that we know of, in an accurate position. However, it does occasionally fail physics forever in that it ignores most of the effect of relativity, notably time dilatation when approaching the speed of light. However, this probably constitutes an Acceptable Breaks from Reality, as there is probably no way to simulate time dilatation without making everyone else move in slo-mo — and if you introduce various people, all moving at the speed of light in their frame of reference, it's probably impossible to accurately represent it to everyone involved.
• Jigsaw, a time-travel Interactive Fiction game, includes extensive footnotes regarding the history (and Artistic License) involved. Several of the puzzles require or strongly encourage detailed knowledge of the Enigma machine, the works of Marcel Proust, and how to fly a B-29 bomber.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle is a love letter to fans of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure manga series: every frame of every animation is a reference to something from the manga series, with a handful of Shout Outs to the OVA series and even the Capcom fighting game that preceded ASB.
• The attention to details of the individual ships' history in KanColle is quite long, from the characters' lines to their rigging to their damaged artwork. For example, battleship Yamato detests the nickname "Hotel Yamato" due to the fact that her historical counterpart was actually nicknamed "Hotel Yamato" because of having some of the best living conditions for sailors at the time.
• Katawa Shoujo: The disabilities are all real-world conditions, including the more obscure ones that various background characters have, with mounds of supporting info provided by several nurses and caregivers who frequent the developers' forum.
• Two of the Kim Possible games for the Game Boy Advance, Drakken's Demise and especially Team Possible, play almost as lost episodes of the series. It starts with the same type of zany plot the show is famous for (a plot to steal Kim's photo album to lead her into a trap set by Monkey Fist, then the album taken by the Senors to a night club in space) and it goes uphill from there.
• The King of Fighters XIII: There's a stage set in London, England featuring police officers in the background. You'd expect the navy-suited officer you see in most other out-of-country works that feature England as a location, especially since it's a game, right? Wrong. The officers are in regiment gear, radio, 'Police' patch, and to top it off, hi-vis jacket. See for yourself.
• L.A. Noire: Team Bondi and Rockstar used over 180,000 photographs to map out and detail 1947 Los Angeles. In addition to the cars, fashions, mannerisms, etc. of the late 40's. The plot is even loosely based on a real world housing scam as well.
• The Last of Us: Leaving aside the aversion of Real Is Brown, which is based on things like "Life After People", disaster survivors like Bill do tend to talk to themselves after extended periods.
• League of Legends: The developers changed the name of Skarner's Crystal Poison ability purely because they realised he injects them rather than the enemy ingesting it themself. It's now called Crystal Venom.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: The artwork of Boons, a type of fly-like enemy, is very accurate to real fly anatomy, faithfully depicting traits that are often forgotten about or left out for the sake of visual streamlining such as their short front-facing antennae. The only real inaccuracy is the four pairs of wings — real flies have the second pair shrunken into minute balancing organs.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker includes in its large ocean overworld effects that simulate the effect of the atmosphere on distant objects, including the gradual fade to blue of a distant object due to the increasing thickness of air between the observer and the object and the "sliding down" of an object below the horizon caused by the earth's curvature on an object that is far away and moving away from the observer.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has several things that shows how much the developers paid attention to the subjects:
    • There's an enemy clan that consists of ninjas. While they do use the stereotypical flair that ninjas are known for, you'll encounter them while they are disguised as a generic NPC like a traveler or merchant, which can cause many players to be caught by surprise. This is a trait that real life ninjas actually used to assassinate their targets since no one would suspect a peddler or a peasant.
    • Lightning strikes during storms can cause fires to nearby trees and grass if struck.
    • The desert region is very hot, which will sap Link's health unless he has protection from the heat. There's a certain set of clothes Link can obtain, which looks like something a person living in a real life desert would wear to beat the heat, and the clothes in the game give a bonus of heat resistance when the whole set is worn. Not only that, but going to the desert at night causes Link to feel chilly, just like how real life deserts can get extremely cold.
    • Death Mountain has a lot of lava everywhere, which makes the area very hot naturally. However, if Link gets too close to the lava without adequate protection (either from specific potions or a specific armor set), he'll actually catch on fire, which completely avoids the Convection, Schmonvection trope that most video games employ. Not only that, but if Link sails in the air over the Death Mountain region, he'll actually burn up due to the air rising from the lava being dangerously hot.
    • One of the game's Magitek/robotic Divine Beasts takes the form of a camel. In moving, it uses the correct pacing gait of camels — both left legs together, then both right legs together — rather than the walk, trot, canter or gallop so familiar in horses, dogs, etc.
• LEGO Batman Trilogy does a lot of this. The Batcomputer has a lot of information on it, showing facts about the Rogues Gallery and even facts about villains you don't even know about, such as Penguin's father dying from pneumonia on a rainy day, and Penguin's mother forcing him to carry an umbrella.
• LEGO Dimensions borders on Continuity Porn with the sheer amount of references to the source material it borrows from. The Midway Arcade-themed story level has a bonus area based on the extremely obscure 2003 reboot of Defender, several of Gandalf's voice lines reference the The Silmarillion, and obscure Sonic characters like Chocola and Maria are name-dropped in the Sonic the Hedgehog world.
• The head admin of the MMO Lusternia is a writer, and he is very good at researching the aspects of real-world mythology that were incorporated into the game. For example, the skillset known as "Highmagic" is an extended love-letter to Kabbalah, with each individual skill accurately corresponding to an aspect of the Sephirot (Hod, Keter, Yesod, etc).
• In the Japanese version of MapleStory, when developing the Hayato and Kanna classes and related content, the development team has researched a lot about Japanese history as well as media related to the Sengoku era.
• The Mario Golf and Mario Tennis series use real-life golf/tennis terms (which is sort of a given), to the extent that many of the games have a term dictionary built in.
  • This is especially true with the handheld games, as they're essentially RPGs set in a sports academy, with golf/tennis rounds in place of battles. Some of the training mini-games explain and let you practice real-world techniques, like the different kinds of serves in tennis.
• Similarly, Mass Effect has reams of encyclopedic info on how everything in the Mass Effect universe works. It's clear that a lot of work went into understanding the total ramifications of the eponymous mass effect, even if the effect itself (gravitational fields arising from currents flowing through a new element) is impossible given current works of physics. If it could exist, a lot of the things described in the game are very plausible.
  • The Mass Effect is actually based on the current cutting edge of physics, namely the research for the Higgs-Boson in the Large Hardron Collider, a particle that arises as an artifact of the field that makes massy things behave like, well, massy things. Mass is directly related to gravity, so it is at least to some degree plausible that manipulation of mass can produce artificial gravity, levitation, and force fields. Furthermore, the speed of light is assumed to be the fastest possible speed because light particles have a mass of zero and everything that has a higher mass would require more energy to move. A mass effect field isolates a ship from the gravity conditions outside the ship, which allows it to accelerate beyond light speed without everything inside being crushed into the back wall, or to make extremely sharp turns without being torn to shreds by inertia.
  • The Mass Effect is created by running an electrical current through a substance called Element Zero. Since human nerves send signals through the body by small electric pulses, people whose bodies are contaminated by Element Zero particles are living Mass Effect generators. With the help of cybernetic implants, they can control these small electric pulses more precisely and use the Element Zero in their body to create Mass Effect fields, allowing them to levitate, deflect bullets, and throw objects with their mind. It's one of the very few cases where "magic" powers are actually consistently explained and plausible, requiring only a single substance with only one relatively simple property.
  • There's also a lot of work shown in the smaller details; for example, in the first game, whenever the Commander leaves the Normandy an on-board VI announces his/her departure and assigns XO Pressley command of the deck, and returns command to Shepard when he/she returns, which is very much in line with modern naval protocol when the captain goes ashore.
• Marsupilami: Hoobadventure: For an extremely goofy and cartoony game, it does have extremely realistic portrayals of dinosaurs. For example: The Spinosauruses have rarely-depicted tail-fins, the Pteranodon have pelican-like throat pouches, and most of the dinosaurs have feathers. Alongside this, rarely-mentioned dinosaur species such as Suchomimuses and Dimetrodons are seen.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid loves doing this to the point where it starts messing with the writing. You can tell that Hideo Kojima researched Aleut languages while designing the game, even if it makes for some really awkward dialog.
  • Less annoyingly, the military tends to get a realistic presentation in the games, though it goes back and forth. The CQC featured in the games was developed by the series' military advisor, Motosada Mori, a former mercenary and SWAT instructor. He explains in an interview that it is best used in built-up areas during situations where there are multiple enemies close to you. He goes on to explain that it is a high level professional tactic that requires extensive experience with knives and firearms and will not necessarily work to your advantage in a fight, and that it is best suited for use by Special Forces personnel. In other words, while it is a very useful technique, it doesn't make you nigh invincible in hand-to-hand combat as portrayed in the games.
  • The Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty credits include a team of people under "Research/Justification". Which means they hire people specifically to put this trope in.
    • For example, the methods and tactics used by the guards, especially during Alert and Search phases, are modeled after real-life techniques, including formations, doorway clearing, hand signals and group movement.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2 also delves so deeply into meme theory that some institutions use it to teach meme theory. And your mom said video games would never teach you anything.
  • Sometimes, it gets to the point where a character's only purpose is to demonstrate the amount of research that went into making the game. Nastasha from the first Metal Gear Solid was pretty much there to spout off technical info on nuclear weapons and the equipment you picked up, as well as ranting about nuclear proliferation. Sigint got this role in the third game as well. Both characters have worked for intelligence agencies and are on hand as experts in their field, and Sigint went on to become the head of DARPA, so it makes sense that their role is pretty much to spout random facts.
  • While a lot of the information about genes in MGS is inaccurate, it's justified by the fact that Liquid does most of the ranting (according to Word of God, he doesn't have a very firm grasp on the subject matter), and the ultimate point of Naomi's personal story is that she's putting too much faith in genetics because it's her only hope of finding out who she is and where she came from. The stuff that the actual characters didn't get wrong is astoundingly well-researched.
  • In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Big Boss can be seen shaking his limbs as an idle animation while climbing. This is an actual climbing technique used to reduce lactic acid buildup... being used by a character who is strong enough to lift a giant robot, and sprint for extended periods without rest. Still, if it'll increase his already-prodigious endurance...
• Minotaur Hotel: The developers made sure that everything in the game was as accurate to their respective mythologies as they could be. The game toys with some of the more obscure parts of ancient mythology in order to tell its story.
• Mirror's Edge Catalyst is based on Le Parkour, as most people know. The designers evidently went to great lengths to keep things plausible: everything Faith can do in the game is possible for an expert traceur, including surviving long falls (~20ft/6m) by rolling upon hitting the ground. One video even argues that Faith's seemingly superhuman endurance is possible for a well-trained athlete in peak physical condition (which Faith would be if she was running like that every day), assuming that only the core story missions are completed, i.e., no side missions and no random exploration of the city looking for collectibles.
• Everything in Monster Hunter that can be based on real-world ecology is.
  • The world has a clear food chain, everything from herbivores and insects up to apex predators, and there are not More Predators Than Prey. Herbivores Are Friendly is averted, as even the softest meatbag might take a swipe at you before running, most have adapted to their harsh environment to have thick hides and natural weapons, and one of the most notoriously aggressive species in the game (the Diabolos) is a highly territorial plant-muncher. Monster species that are based on real animals take obvious cues from their behavior, and this has been known to evolve as real-world understanding does (such as the discovery of dromaeosaurids likely having feathers — a new species of Bird Wyvern was promptly introduced, sporting brightly-colored plumage). While there are plenty of fantastical elements, these are accounted for with Fantastic Science, and creatures that completely defy classification are acknowledged as an enigma at the center of much study.
  • Brought to another level with Turf Wars, which were added in Monster Hunter: World. If two large monsters encounter each other, they may get aggravated and get in a Turf War, fighting each other, with the losing party getting dealt a lot of damage. However, like in real life, fights between two large predators rarely end in death, as a predator is often more trouble than they're worth compared to prey, so it's far more likely is that the losing beast will concede the fight and run away. Only a few monsters like the Nergigante and the Deviljho, that are undeniably at the top of their ecosystem's food chain, actually have other weaker predators as their preferred prey, and they will kill their opponent or chase it until it dies.
  • Despite being a game about killing giant monsters and dragons with proportionally huge weapons, the game is surprisingly accurate in representing the hunting habits of humans, especially prior to the invention of the gun. Humans are persistent and opportunistic hunters, and the game rewards you for acting exactly like that: hunting in groups, placing traps, using other animals as hunting companions, attacking your prey while it's sleeping and whittle down their endurance untill they fall from exhaustion — this is how in real life, humans managed to hunt animals much bigger, stronger, and faster than them, to the point of being so effective we drove several animal species to extinction before we even concieved of guns. Last, but not least, the majority of hunting quests give you a time limit of fifty minutes, as while some hunts may end quickly enough, others will keep your eyes on the timer due to the monsters' endurance, aggressiveness and the occasional habit of running away; this is because long-lasting hunts are Truth in Television as well, and many real life hunts have taken hours, or even days, to be completed succesfully.
• Mortal Kombat X: NRS did an extensive research while designing Kotal Khan, making him quite possibly the most accurate depiction of an Aztec god (Huitzilopochtli) in western media to date. To wit:
  • Kotal's whole body is covered in ceremonial blue paint. Huitzlipochtli was depicted as a man with blue skin
  • Kotal's armor (particularly his helmet) is accurate to the way some scholars think the armor of Aztec's elite warriors (Eagle Knights) were.
  • Kotal's weapon of choice is a Macuahuitl, the armor used by Aztec warriors. He also wields an obsidian knife called Tecpatl, which was a ceremonial knife used by Aztec priests to present blood offerings to the gods, something that Kotal can also do.
  • His three combat variants (War God, Sun God and Blood God) can be seen as representating the different aspects of Huitzilopochtli, who not only was the god of war but also a sun deity and thus, he was fed with human hearts.
  • His different combo attacks are named in nahuatl, the Aztec Empire's official language.
  • Even the name of his race (Osh-tek) is an allusion to the Aztec.
• At times, Mother 3 takes a little time out to justify some Reality Is Unrealistic moments (which, in a game that is very much a Quirky Work, is saying something), such as explaining that there are types of frog that can survive in desert climates, or that mole tunnels actually can be incredibly complex in real life (even encouraging the player to go and do some mole-watching sometime).
• MultiVersus: Player First Games did a lot of research in regards to characters and properties owned by Warner Bros.. One good example of this is Steven Universe, as analyzed by one Twitter user. Every move, taunt and animation references an element that Steven showed in the series at one point or another, from his general ability to generate shields, to his healing spit that also brought watermelon Stevens to life (which can be used as his down special), and even some of his normal moves are inspired by attacks he did in the movie and Future.
• It may not be particularly useful information you're learning, but the fictional language of the Myst games isn't a cypher or random gibberish — it's an actual consistent, working language with its own syntax, suffixes, prefixes, etc. It's apparently somewhat similar in structure to Hebrew.
  • The sequel, Riven, requires you to figure out the D'ni numeral system (which uses a base 25 counting system) as part of solving a puzzle.
    • Even more impressive, the D'ni numbering system is actually a multiple-base number system, which utilizes a base-5 system to construct its numerals, and a base 25 system to allow for the concatenation of numerals to create numbers over 25.
• Nearly every installment of the Nancy Drew games features this to some extent. The plots incorporate random in-depth knowledge about locations, histories, historical figures, and legends from around the world. Oftentimes there are books lying around full of fun trivia. The puzzles might involve real codes, secret signs, or (usually) well-translated foreign languages. The games can teach you about the periodic table, how to read sheet music, how to lift fingerprints, how to play card games, the list goes on. One game even includes a pretty tasty cake recipe.
• In NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD, aspects of online streaming culture, and social media in general presented authentically, including the unpleasant sides of social media.
• In New Horizons, the modders have went to great lengths to depict the game as historically accurate as possible:
  • Depending on the time period, nations use different flags and uniforms for their soldiers. For instance, England's Union Jack only appears in the Napoleonic Era.
  • Every nation uses ships unique to them, like France with the Soleil Royal, and England with the Victory. Some ship types are also vastly preferred by specific nations, like Spain and their never-ending fleets of galleons.
  • Pirates only use small, light and fast vessels to strike and retreat quickly into shallow waters where bigger, slower ships can't follow them.
  • Towns have different names and are controlled by different nations in different time periods.
  • There is a wide selection of flags, all which have been used by different nations and pirates through history - the occasional Easter Egg nonwithstanding.
• Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: A lot of concepts:
  • The Gigantic was an actual sister ship to the Titanic, along with William Thomas Stead and Morgan Robertson.
  • Sheldrake was, and is a real person, and is the creator of the pseudoscientific theory of Morphogenetic Fields.
  • Prosopagnosia is an actual neurological disability.
  • Ice-9 is a real substance (its in-game properties are made up, however) and indeed it was created in the 1963 Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle before its actual discovery.
  • Not to mention the mystery of crystalized glycerite.
• The '90s Windows game Odell Down Under has surprisingly detailed information on a number of aquatic species found in the Great Barrier Reef. Every time you start a game or a new round in a game there's an info screen which gives you details about the fish you're playing as. The whole point of the game, in fact, is to keep your fish alive by having it eat what it actually eats, avoid predators, and get cleaned by cleaner fish. The sharks didn't always need cleaner fish however, thanks to the remoras that live on sharks and eat their parasites. There was even an in-game fish encyclopedia on the title screen that gave detail on other lifeforms you couldn't play as like plankton and algae.
• The first game of the Outpost franchise had according to The Other Wiki as developer an ex-NASA scientist, and it shows. Among other things: no FTL to speak of, a realistic interstellar ship powered by a fusion drive, a nuclear weapon launched against the asteroid Vulcan's Hammer which sought to divert its path instead of breaking it apart^note Most Real Life ideas to defend against asteroids revolve about changing their trajectories, not destroying them, the stars where you can go being Real Life ones (the planetary systems are totally fictional), and the planets are basically Real Life Solar System bodies — all terrestrial planets (except Earth), the Moon, Ceres (the largest body in the asteroid belt, now a minor planet), Phobos (the largest moon of Mars), Pluto, and as uncolonizable ones Jupiter and Saturn — with the Serial Numbers Filed Off.
• The original visual novel of Phantom of Inferno went into obsessive detail on the guns the characters used. Obsessive. It's borderline disturbing. It was toned down in the US DVD-play release of the game (which removed the option of letting you choose which gun you wanted to use).
• The Pokémon games have a tendency to drop little educational bits in, like museums and space launch centers. In addition, many Pokémon have Pokédex entries which refer to real-life animals and places.
  • Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald have a side-quest to catch the legendary golems (Regirock, Regice, and Registeel) which involves reading Braille. FireRed and LeafGreen also have Braille plaques in dungeons. The credits reveal that they actually consulted real organizations for the blind for all their Braille plaques.
  • The series also generally averts Artistic License – Paleontology with the fantasy creatures based on real extinct species, design details aside, as given information is accurate and the series draws upon a somewhat wider range of species than most media (an anomalocaris-like biped, a eurypterid, crinoids, Archelon, etc.).
    • The 'Tyrannosaurus rex'' Pokémon Tyrunt and Tyrantrum even reference feathered tyrannosaurs. There's also a reference to polar-dwelling dinosaurs with the sauropod Pokemon Amaura and Aurorus.
    • The trope also works in reverse from time to time, whereby the research sneaks in a reference or two to the games. With one example, Aerodactylus scolopaciceps, the paper for it being thus named even states that "it seemed a pertinent name for a genus which has been synonymous with [the species] for so long due to a combination of features."
    • Come Pokémon Sword and Shield, there are even fossil Pokémon that are based on the inaccurate attempts to reconstruct fossilised organisms by 19th century paleontologists.
  • Zubat's lack of eyes is a reference to troglomorphism. Its Emerald Pokédex entry even describes this outright, saying that "while living in pitch-black caverns, their eyes gradually grew shut and deprived them of vision". Although this adaption is not seen in any real mammals such as bats, it is seen in a variety of other species, and makes some sense for a creature which mostly lives in caves.
  • For Wi-Fi Mystery Gifts that involve Pokemon the anime characters have had, their Natures are relatively close to their personality. Ash's Dracovish and Iris's Axew being Naive nature, for example.
  • Wiglett and Toedscool are a reference to the phenomenon of convergent evolution. Although they greatly resemble Diglett and Tentacool, respectively, they're completely unrelated species, and just happen to look superficially similar due to living in an environment with similar selection pressure. For example, both Diglett and Wiglett lead an underground lifestyle, so they both evolved slender bodies able to tunnel underground quickly, and both of them have a keen sense of smell, as vision is not a very useful sense underground.
  • In Pokémon Sleep, the Totodile line sleeps with one eye open, like real-life crocodilians.
• Policenauts, in addition to being unavailable in English, deterred fan translations because of the precise technical terminology used in the Japanese release of the game, including the results of research in biology, astronautics, and history. In fact, an independent translator named Marc Laidlaw (not to be confused with the Valve writer) spent time with a number of textbooks and other sources of research in an attempt to decipher the decidedly native-centric text dump which includs college level colloquialisms and kanji.
• Portal 2: Valve did extensive period research to accurately recreate the look and feel of the 1950s, '70s, and '80s-era Aperture Laboratories facilities deep beneath the modern Enrichment Center. They also initially located the facility in a real abandoned salt mine in Cleveland, Ohio, although the game itself mysteriously retcons this to be in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There is a salt mine in Michigan, but in the Lower Peninsula, beneath, of all places, Detroit. But the ultimate example is found in the Final Boss battle, where it is an important detail (that very nearly fell victim to Reality Is Unrealistic) that the portal gun's "shots" travel at the speed of light. Question: What's 1.4 seconds away at the speed of light? Answer: The Moon. Also, the amount of experimentation and research they put into deducing that smooth jazz is in fact the funniest type of music.
  • Sharks have a reputation of being mindless, bloodthirsty killers of humans. The writers seem to know this is entirely false,^note sharks don't even like the taste of human flesh, in fact based on the following quote:
  GLaDOS: Excellent! You're a predator, and these tests are your prey. Speaking of which, I was researching sharks for an upcoming test. Do you know who else murders people who are only trying to help them? Did you guess "sharks"? Because that's wrong. The correct answer is "nobody". Nobody but you is that pointlessly cruel.
  • As an additional piece of information that shocked many gamers upon release, moon dust is incredibly toxic to human cells, which Cave Johnson learns the hard way.
• Despite the large amounts of Artistic License and Rule of Cool, Primal Carnage has a few subtle hints that the creators did their research. The Pteranodon walks on all fours, is toothless, launches quadrupedally from the ground, and is explicitly stated on the official site NOT to be a dinosaur. The Dilophosaurus is correctly sized and lacks a neck frill. The theropods have non-pronated hands, and one of the available skins for the raptors is fully feathered. Finally, the Carnotaurus has stubby forelimbs with no visible claws and is correctly portrayed as a Lightning Bruiser with a difficult time turning at top speed.
• Progressbar 95: The game creators who have made this game clearly researched Windows systems. Each Progressbar equivalent of an OS looks and sounds just how you'd expect, also having requirements to unlock them typically match their hardware capabilities. There are also references to rather obscure versions, like Progressbar 95 plus which is based on the enhanced version of Win 95 most didn't own because of 98, Progressbar Largehorn which is based on Windows Longhorn, a prototype of Vista.
• The makers of Quest for Glory IV have a lot of knowledge regarding Tarot cards, so you get several lengthy (though fairly impressive) fortune telling sequences giving the proper card combinations for the hero's past, present, and future, most of the important characters in the game, and the possible endings.
• The team behind the Red Baron series did a considerable amount of research into World War I combat aviation, and it shows in the attention to detail given to the physics engine and the aircraft designs. They also included a great deal of supplementary information. Much of it is solely educational flavor, but a significant portion consists of tactics and maneuvers which are quite useful in-game.
• Red Dead Redemption II:
  • Particularly when it comes to Saint Denis, an Alternate Universe recreation of New Orleans:
    • The hitching posts shaped like horse heads actually do exist in the city, and were used for the exact same purpose around that period of time
    • New Orleans is home to many above-ground graveyards such as the one Arthur Morgan and John Marston run through. In fact, 90% of the graves in the city are above ground.
    • Several different trolleys still runs through the city of New Orleans today—they're referred to by locals as streetcars, however
    • Many different areas of New Orleans can be identified by locals, including Rockstar's recreations of the French Quarter, Lee's Circle, Jackson's Square, and something similar to the Garden District/Uptown.
    • The vampire side-mission in Saint Denis is reflective of the huge amount of vampire lore the city has, a lot of which has made it into popular culture. (Interview with the Vampire, anyone?)
    • When greeted, some of the NPCS will address you in French-Creole.
  • Back at the end of the 19th century, tuberculosis was a pretty big deal, and there were no cures or antibiotics or vaccines back then. And although Arthur doesn't know it, it's not just the tuberculosis or its spread that does him in: according to the Game Theory video, research has shown that smoking, alcoholism, malnutrition and vitamin D deficiency, and physical injury/trauma to and/or not caring for the human body have a high risk of tuberculosis, which is no wonder Arthur succumbs to the disease at a young age (in the High Honor ending, that is).
  • In one camp interaction with Javier Escuella and Rev. Swanson, look closely at Javier while he's making the Sign of the Cross, and you can see him kissing his thumb as the finishing point of the open right hand gesture before returning to his prayer; this shows that in some Catholic regions like Mexico (which is his home country) and other parts of Latin America, it is customary for one to kiss one's thumb at the conclusion of the ritual gesture.
  • Chinese immigrant workers can be found working on the Central Union Railroad, and Saint Denis contains a sizeable Chinese community; these Chinese immigrants all speak Cantonese, as Guangdong (where Cantonese is spoken) is where most of the Chinese immigrants of this time came from.
  • There's also a lot of historical accuracy put into this game, as described by the YouTube channel Real Pixels in this video.
• Resident Evil:
  • Although it's quite clear the T and G viruses do whatever the hell they need to have happen to further the game's plot, it's also quite clear that the developers did some serious homework on virology. Many of the files are loaded with Genius Bonuses, but most notably was Sergei Vladimir's "partial immunity" to the T-Virus. Such a thing actually exists in real life; it's even the principle behind how viral vaccines work.
  • And, while the series often takes flak for its use of vaccines to cure disease rather than prevent them, there are indeed vaccines that cure existing ailments known as Therapeutic Vaccines. In fact, while the first one to be released didn't come out until 2010, their development goes back to the 1950s and is completely in-line with the timeline of the Umbrella Corporation's viral research. Furthermore, as Therapeutic Vaccines in real life are currently used to treat Cancer (and hopefully soon, HIV), they absolutely are the kind of thing that could treat a virus that causes malignant mutations in the human body.
  • In the Resident Evil remake, the flash of lightning comes a good second before you hear the crack of thunder, which is actually how it works in real life. The developers have explained they loved how they could take advantage of how most works have the thunder and lightning happen at the same time to give the mansion an almost supernatural air with something completely rooted in fact.
  • A well-known quirk amongst the Speed Runner community in Resident Evil 4 is that Leon runs his absolute fastest with a grenade equipped, but this is actually rooted in fact. Soldiers and police are trained to run in a controlled and deliberate manner when carrying a firearm, which of course wouldn't be a full sprint. However carrying small weights in each hand (like a grenade) will speed your sprint up because it improves balance and widens your stride. It's not entirely accurate as technically he'd need a grenade in each hand, but it's far from being a glitch or oversight.
• In Roots of Pacha, a prehistoric Farm Life Sim, carrots are purple when you first discover and harvest them, and they get their popular orange color through generations of propagation aka multiple harvests.
• The developers of Scribblenauts. Over 22,802 words, and artists have to draw a sprite for every word. Wow. Though it's technically less than that, since a lot of sprites have multiple names applied to them, but it'd still be an impressive number regardless.
• The shipwreck-diving game Sea Rogue has a manual which lists hundreds of shipwrecks ranging from Viking boats from circa 1000 AD to the Titanic. The developers themselves include a disclaimer that this is not, and cannot be, all completely accurate information, but it is very impressive.
• The achievement list for Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. Someone at Sumo Digital clearly had too much fun delving into Sega lore to write up their names.
• Sensible World Of Soccer was practically an encyclopedia of mid-1990s soccer teams. The game featured around 1500 teams from countries all around the world, and included individual statistics for tens of thousands of players.
• Shadow Hearts: Covenant has the Gallery of the Dead, which could also be called "Learn Cyrillic! With Princess Anastasia". Many passages in the dungeon are blocked with gates marked with Cyrillic letters, which can be opened with corresponding levers. When pulling them, Anastasia will tell you how the letter is pronounced, and in the end all of these letters will form the word "декабрь" (december). A far cry from The Backwards Я, expected for such non-plot-important element.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • The Demons/Personas/etc. you can obtain are all real mythological figures, drawn from everything from Vodou gods, to Judeo-Christian figures, to creatures and characters of Greek and Roman legends. The in-game compendium (first introduced in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne) offers short descriptions of where each demon comes from. The artwork by Atlus's master designer and prolific series artist Kazuma Kaneko makes it even more delightful, giving every single monster its own spin while retaining a deep and clear understanding of who they are supposed to be. Even when the games choose to derive their characters from popular culture, such as the Hell Biker or Alice, they're treated with care and attention to detail. This has the added effect of people learning sometimes shocking truths about popular deities that appear in other games. Like, say, Shiva.
  • Persona:
    • The sub-series gets one specific thing right that so many works across multiple mediums get wrong: Tarot Motifs. The "Social Links (Confidants in Persona 5)" are all built around specific major tarot arcana, and if you play them out and pay attention, you'll realize that, yes, these are in fact accurate representations of what the arcana are meant to reflect, even for the often misrepresented ones. This includes Death in Persona 3, which can look like it's being misrepresented as a "oh god end of the world thing" at first. Especially if you're attentive to what's really going on, you'll realize the motif is being used exactly right and it'll probably blow your mind. Persona 3 Portable's female route (that some would dismiss as fanservice) still sticks to the representations of the arcana in the new social links. Notably, it gives a new and deeper meaning for the Fortune (Ryoji Mochizuki), Moon (Shinjiro Aragaki) and Strength (Koromaru) Arcana.
    • The series also shows a sound grasp of Jungian psychiatric theory. "Persona" and "Shadow" are obvious, but Philemon being named after a character from Jung's Red Book (and serving much the same purpose!) makes it clear that the developers paid attention.
    • Class sequences involve being lectured (and often quizzed) on actual grammar, history, and the like (although generally on a 6th or 7th grade level); in Persona 3 FES, this includes a real discussion of tarot cards and paganism that's mostly on the level.
    • This also goes over to the protagonists' and antagonists' Personas. The names either reflect the characters' backstory or sometimes even future events in the game, to the point of almost being spoilers if you know your mythology. Persona 3 has an excellent example of the latter: Akihiko's initial persona is Polydeuces, better known as Pollux and the brother of Castor, Shinjiro's Persona, who together make up the constellation Gemini. Polydeuces was given immortality while Castor was fated for death, therefore foreshadowing Shinjiro's death. Also, the main Personas' models often also reflects the original myth (like every part of Orpheus's body being prosthetic except the head, since he was beheaded in the myth).
    • In Persona 3, Helel is one of the Personas needed to fuse Lucifer. Helel is also the name of a god in Canaanite mythology believed to have eventually evolved into Lucifer.
    • Persona 4 heavily features actual Nietzschean philosophy. In fact, a lot of the villains fall into the Nietzsche Wannabe category while the heroes and the rest of the setting come closer to his actual beliefs.
  • Persona 4 also features a different example of the trope: in the good ending path, Nanako Dojima makes a miraculous recovery after flatlining. This is an extremely rare but actual real-life phenomenon known as Lazarus syndrome.
  • Persona 5:
    • Yusuke's Persona, Ishikawa Goemon, has "Ixicava" written on his clothes, a nod to the inaccurate transcribing of "Ixicava Goyemon" his name was given after his execution.
    • Ann's Persona Carmen is constantly smoking a cigar. In the original novella and play, Carmen worked in a tobacco factory and is often depicted as smoking.
  • In addition to the demon/persona designs mentioned above, the mythologies are often worked into the plot; for instance, one sidequest in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey involves Hariti getting a hankering for babies and requesting that you find a pomegranate to keep her cravings in check, since she's sworn off them. And the person who gives you said fruit for Hariti? Why, it's none other than Persephone. And they're just two of many denizens in the Shin Megami Tensei universe. Additionally, the series as a whole uses a fair bit of actual Gnostic mythology.
  • There's also the fact that Lucifer and Satan are separate entities (not only that, but Satan is generally depicted as working for God). This can be traced back to certain interpretations of the Judeo-Christian mythos depicting Satan as essentially the loyal devil on God's shoulder instead of the fallen archangel actively opposing God.
  • Devil Survivor 2: The characters eventually notice that the mysterious Septentrions are named after stars in the big dipper, leading them to conclude there'll be seven total. Though this forgets to acount for Alcor, twin star to Mizir (who appear like a single point when seen from Earth). And of course, what is the big dipper used for? Pointing to the Pole Star — Polaris, the Administrator of the Heavenly Throne.
    • Polaris herself deserves special mention. In the final fight, she's actually made up of three units: Polaris A, Polaris Ab, and Polaris B. Much like Mizir and Alcor above, Polaris is actually made up of three stars. Polaris B's attack range is infinite, reflecting the fact that it's the furest away from Earth.
    • In addition, Polaris' dialogue mentions her predecessors on the Heavenly Throne, Thuban and Vega. And that when she eventually abdicates, her successor will be Errai. If you couldn't tell, she's mentioning the previous and eventual next Pole Stars!
• Sid Meier. Reading his manuals for the original Railroad Tycoon and Pirates!, for example, was downright educational. The original Pirates! even forced the player to figure out where they were by using a sextant to identify only their latitude and land masses to get their bearing.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri shows off all the work they put on creating plausible future technology through the detailed descriptions of the Tech Tree's scientific advancements, as well as through the fictional quotes of books written by the faction leaders.
  • Not to mention the huge amounts of data collected to make the general idea of the planet and its lifeforms plausible.
  • The fascinating part is that very little of the actual science has been outright disproven yet.
  • Some of it's already been done ahead of schedule in Real Life — although some of the more mundane technologies such as Synthetic Fossil Fuels, Superconductors, Information Networks and the like are understandably within the realm of known information due to rediscovery, more exotic ones like Gene Splicing and the Mind/Machine Interface are currently being studied.
• Silent Hill: Homecoming has an unusual one. The original series was developed in Japan, and usually has lots of forgivable errors regarding American culture. Homecoming was developed in the United States by American studio Double Helix Games, and the devs did their research regarding background details about the US Army. If you understand American military culture at all, and you remember that the devs were American, you have a good chance to guess The Reveal right about the time you finished the tutorial level. There's no possible way Alex can be mistaken for anything except someone trying to impersonate an American soldier, even if it is because of a psychiatric disorder. He can fool civilians and people not familiar with the U.S. military, but he was never trained to fight in any way... but Alex believes he's an experienced veteran regardless. Accordingly, the game's combat is clumsy and awkward to reflect that he has actually no idea how to fight, and his attempts to pass himself off as a soldier are flagrantly obvious to anyone familiar with the U.S. military.
• SimAnt has two lengthy chapters on ants in the User's Manual, plus famous quotes about ants and an appendix full of scientific terms. To top it off, they included an unreasonable number of ant puns. It's freaking fantastic.
  • Moving away from all this antagonism, other early Maxis Sim games such as SimEarth, A-Train and Sim Farm have lengthy sections at the ends of their manuals devoted to the subject of the game (Earth science, the history of railways, a study of farming...). And they're all pretty damn awesome.
  • In SimEarth, the game itself is a fully functional integrated climate, life, and civilization model, not terribly unlike those used by the IPCC to determine the effects of climate change. In fact, the game itself is the best way to explain the gridded calculation method to non-scientists.
  • This seemed to be more common in the '90s, as Lords of the Realm and Jane's Fighters Anthology both came with a pamphlet describing certain 12th century castles and their histories in the case of the former, and flight and air combat tactics and principles in the case of the latter (in fact the "pamphlet" was a book a few hundred pages long in the case of the Jane's game, which is not suprising given Jane's role in the game).
    • This was also for Copy Protection purposes: the game would ask you to enter a certain word on a certain line on a certain page to keep playing.
  • In certain countries such as Japan, Gran Turismo 4 came with a booklet a couple hundred pages long, that was filled with expertise from professional drivers describing basic racing strategies, and car dynamics and so on.
    • Speaking of Gran Turismo, the creator of the game was a former professional driver himself, who just won 1st place in his class of sports cars.
• Songs and Flowers delves into facts about mental illnesses that often go overlooked by other media.
  • Noct's struggles with depression are less about feeling sad and more about a general sense of hopelessness, the physical symptoms such as difficulty sleeping and focusing in school, and his fears of being a burden on his already struggling family. He also implies that he gets into fights as a form of Self-Harm.
  • Carol's social anxiety often leads to him locking himself in his room because of how difficult it is to deal with social situations. He also admits to being afraid of trying new things out of fear of failure, which really worries his mothers.
  • Jazz, the protagonist, also displays many symptoms of ADHD. Not just Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!, but she can also get hyperfocused, loves learning new things, and only really opens up around friends.
• Spider-Man: Miles Morales put a truly stunning level of effort into Puerto Rican representation: the flag being prominent everywhere in Harlem (including Miles' home), the restaurants and references to Puerto Rican cuisine, the attention to detail given to the culture and dialogue, even having some of Miles' extended family members dressed in folkloric jíbaro attire. Small wonder the game is extremely popular in Puerto Rico.
• Spider-Man: Web of Shadows showed a bit too much work. At one point, Wolverine suspects Spider-Man has been possessed by one of the symbiotes currently ravaging New York City^note He has, but unlike the rest of the victims he's still in control. During the following boss fight, he stops periodically to ask trivia questions. Said trivia questions are very obscure references to continuity... which can lead to problems since your answers will affect the Karma Meter.
• In Splatoon 2:
  • The Salmonids being part of a Horde Mode in Salmon Run is not a coincidence. It's similar to a real phenomenon where Salmon become "zombies" after spawning, because their bodies break down from lack of food and not handling freshwater. Splatoon 2 seems to take place in a universe where Salmon were able to do it a little too well.
  • In Octo Expansion, all of the passengers of the Deepsea Metro are based on animals actually found in the deepest parts of the ocean, such as gulper eels, sea angels, blobfishes, siphonophores, and tunicates. Of particular note is the ping pong tree sponge woman, a species that was discovered not long before Octo Expansion's release.
• Lock picking in the Splinter Cell series is very realistically depicted, with Sam properly using actual tools (a torsion wrench and a hook pick) to single-pin pick the locks he encounters.
• On the subject of Pripyat, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl team definitely did the research (including several trips to the exclusion zone). Overlay the map of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant from the game and the real one from Google Earth, for instance. Also, Pripyat is almost dead on. Other locations (Agroprom, for instance) are uncanny. Seeing photographs of the building that Agroprom is based on is chilling. Even the faded mural on a side wall is the same as in game.
• BioWare also showed their extensive knowledge of the Star Wars Expanded Universe (now Legends canon) with their Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: The Old Republic, with the Flavor Text of many weapons, armor, and items referencing events in the canon, a large codex in the MMO, a very accurate depiction of a Vong ship in one of Canderous's stories, and so forth. The Aurebesh posters and signs in the game are spot-on, and the MMO has some jokes and dialogue in the Mandalorian language invented for the expanded universe (the only reason it's not accurate in the first game? It hadn't been invented yet). Obsidian's sequel to the first game takes all that research, and adds the various lightsaber forms and their strengths and weaknesses, even more references and research in terms of aliens, worlds, cultures, and the universe's history... then also proceeds to deconstruct the hell out of everything Star Wars to the point even the head writer admitted he might have gone too far.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U features Mega Man as a playable character, and you can tell that the animators have put a lot of effort◊ into making his animations match those of his classic sprites.
    • In Mega Man's debut trailer, there are brief cuts to a screen inside Mega Man's head showing silhouettes of different Robot Masters he's defeated. All of the Robot Masters shown are in the same poses as their official art, and Guts Man is even shown with a Light number rather than a Wily number, due to being created by Dr. Light rather than Dr. Wily.
    • Mega Man's Final Smash involves summoning alternate-continuity versions of himself, all of which fire a laser with their left arm...except for MegaMan.EXE, who fires with his right arm, like in his original game.
      In particular, this reflects the handedness they seemed to show in their original series, where most actually had Ambidextrous Sprites but were usually facing to the right. Most of the Mega Men shoot with the hand farthest from the screen, which when facing right is their left hand; EXE alone shoots with his near (right) hand in his source series.
    • Whenever Mega Man uses an attack that requires both Mega Busters at once, he stops to vent excess heat to prevent them from overheating, previously noted in Super Adventure Rockman. This is especially notable since said game was never exported, and shunned and declared non-canon by Keiji Inafune.
  • It's not just Mega Man. This video analysis does a pretty good job showcasing the small nuances put into Little Mac's design and moveset for Smash for 3DS/Wii U to make him believable as a fighter. It goes into why Little Mac has a poor air game, why he uses certain kinds of punches, and even the reasoning behind his idle and dashing animations. Sakurai definitely did his homework.
  • All characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate can tread water for a few seconds on stages that have it regardless of their swimming skills in their home series. Characters who ordinarily have Super Drowning Skills (Sonic and Inkling) or have a weakness to the stuff (Charizard and Incineroar) will take damage from it.
• Hilariously, Japanese H-Game RPG The Tale of Undercrust is probably the only H-game in existence that could claim to be a viable substitute for a metallurgy textbook. The heroine Hasumi has the option to interact with various minerals to collect Junk Chips, upon which her Ridiculously Human Robot ally Marco will give her a incredibly detailed explanation of the mineral and its unique properties. What other H-game could tell you what birefringence is?
• Tatsunoko vs. Capcom does a lot of research in regards to the material of Tatsunoko, which is a given, considering that the people who worked were fans of the shows.
• Tears to Tiara 2: Surpassing the first game. The amount of details corresponding to the Classical period, the Punic Wars, and Phoenician mythology is amazing.
  • The Hero is based on Hannibal Barca but named after his father. Monomachus is a real life Carthaginian general under Hannibal. Enneads is a book on Neoplatonism. Dion is short for Diogenes. Charis is one of the three Graces. Laelius is general and friend of Scipio Africanus. Aemilia is Scipio's wife. Ashtarte, Tanit, Eshmun and Melqart are all real Phoenician gods, and were really at one time thought of as two gods, Tanit-Ashtarte and Eshmun-Melqart.
  • Tamar is roughly Toletum. Avron is a mix of Hibera and Emporion. Tartessos, a mix of Atlantis and Tenochtitlan, is named after one of the earliest Phoenician colonies on the Iberian Peninsula. Cemenelum, part of modern Nice, was the capital of the Roman province of Alpes Maritimae. Imperial Capital Alba Longa, based on Ancient Rome, is named after the real city state that founded the Latin League and was a major rival to Rome. Carthage appears with its Phoenician name of Qart Hadast.
• In The New Tetris, the soundtrack is made up mostly of Neil Voss's signature techno, but he spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that techno is flavored with the authentic local music of each part of the world each stage is based on. For instance, for the stage set in Morocco, Voss could have created a generic Arabian sounding piece, but instead he made something that sounds like traditional Berber celebratory music fused with his brand of techno; and "Polyasia," the theme for the Polynesia stage, is centered around gamelan sounds rather than the stereotypical Hawaiian ukulele music.
• Compared to fellow Crossover Cosmology Shin Megami Tensei, Tokyo Afterschool Summoners isn't very strict or verbatim in referring to its source materials when designing their mythology-based player characters, however there is still one or two accurate mythological references per character. For example, Typhon in Housamo is a Big Fun Surfer Dude shark Beast Man, a far cry from The Dreaded Eldritch Abomination he was in the original Classical Mythology. However, he has a Fear of Thunder, which nicely ties into the tale of his mythological self's defeat by Zeus, the god of thunder.
• Total War:
  • Total War: Shogun 2 uses a woodblock printing art style all over the place. Creative Assembly had their artists study traditional techniques for over a year to get it right.
  • Total War: Three Kingdoms continues in the same way. For instance, faction banners use the correct characters for the Warlord's name, using the regional and/or politically appropriate choice of the two period-accurate written languages in use at the time.
• Touhou Project: The amount of mythology that ZUN is familiar with isn't generally apparent in the main games, where the emphasis is more on creating something fun. But in the side materials it can get a bit nuts, with plots based on obscure Shinto rituals (and now Bhuddism, too).
  • And the fandom exaggerates this, with doujinshi plots often hinging on or driven by more obscure pieces of the lore about the youkai characters.
• Trauma Center (Atlus):
  • The GUILT diseases in Under the Knife are based on very real and very frightening diseases not well known by the average joe. Also, the first game subverts the idea of using a defibrillator to get a pulse (which is a huge no-no in reviving a person's heart)
  • The sequel Trauma Team pays even more attention to detail by making one of the six gameplay modes be based on diagnosing illnesses. As a result, the super-virus of the game, Rosalia, can feel more threatening and realistic, despite still being outside the realm of possibility.
• The Tree of Life: Many upgrades and parts are taken from actual biological terminology. Cell buyables called "Totipotent" and "Pluripotent" sound like random words related to "Omnipotent" at first, but looking them up reveals those are actual descriptions of cell potency, while the Science layer is full of scientific terms related to its layers.
• The writers of the original Twilight Syndrome duology went to great lengths in order to make their main characters feel believable, even though said characters were a trio of high school girls, and they were not. They accomplished this by having their liaison at an advertising company get together a group of actual high school girls and sat down with them for five hours at a family restaurant taking notes on their vernacular and mannerisms, and also did something similar on the set with the models who portrayed said characters. They then used these notes as a basis for their dialogue which was also handed to a female staff member (who happened to be named Mika, same as one of the characters in question) to look over before being finalized. The result was that the writing for the characters became quite popular among fans of the game.
• The Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series is a love letter to obscure Australian wildlife. The first game alone has a thylacine hero, a cassowary Big Bad, a Tasmanian devil, dingo, lyrebird, leafy sea dragon, bilbies and a green tree frog as allies, a tiger shark, thorny devil, ghost bat and goanna as antagonists, and frill-necked lizards, blue-tongued skinks, barracudas and wombats as generic enemies.
• In the MMO, UCGO, players are able to pilot a humongous variety of Mobile Suits, Fighter Jets, Tanks, and more from various Gundam series taking place in the One Year War. The makers of the game even made sure everything in the game was in a 1:1 scale!
• Umineko: When They Cry. OK, cabbala doesn't work exactly that way, but the author obviously did some research, as he uses some basic and not well-known concepts of magic (like, "a part equals the whole").
  • He sure did read up on the Key of Solomon. The magic circles used in the series do show the meaning they're supposed to represent.
• Early in development, Wick (2020)'s creators visited cathedrals and studied stained glass windows to replicate them and make the cathedral setting of the game look more realistic.
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt both attach great attention to detail and are backed by some real life examples.
  • Letters used in game are derived from Glagolitic – the eldest Slavic alphabet.
  • Siege tower is based on attempts to reconstruct Helepolis, the gigantic siege tower used in the Siege of Rhodes in 305 BCE. Also other siege engines like counterweight trebuchet and ballista are based on reconstructions, but are bigger, fling bigger projectiles and have much longer range than real life examples.
    Foltest: That was a ballista, Excellency. Its arms strengthened with bronze plates and strung with horsehair, it can propel heavy bolts up to a mile away. A deadly and very costly weapon. An experienced crew can cock and release two bolts each minute. Yet it has one flaw.
    Shilard: Your Grace, please take cover!
    Foltest: The recoil of the arms is so strong upon firing... (another bolt flies) that the weapon shifts. It simply cannot hit the same spot twice.
  • Buldings and interiors are based on historical reconstructions. The architecture style of temples are mix of Gothic (portals, arcs, stained glass) with massive Romanesque towers. Amphitheater in Loc Muinne are based on ancient Greek theatres. Wooden crane from Flotsam was inspired by an analogical structure found in Gdansk, Poland.
  • The stone statues of Vaiopatis, hidden in the forest near Flotsam, are based on the existing remains of pagan cultures, mostly on “Zbruch Idol”, a stone statue of Svantevid, Slavic god.
  • The massive use of medival heraldry (e.g. Temerian coat of arms are based on the arms of "France Moderne").
  • Armors of Keadwen, Temeria, and Nilfgaard are based in turn on XIV, XV and XVIc. armors, to depict technological advancement of specific nations.
  • Design of steel swords are based on Oakeshott's typology of blades, pommels, crosses and grips. Sometimes they uses flame-blade, side rings, finger rings and/or flukes, based on renaissance real life examples (like flamberge).
  • Geralt and other characters employ some very authentic European swordplay. The "rest" animations between Geralt's attacks correspond with stances from German longsword manuals. Olgierd von Everic from the Hearts of Stone expansion uses a sabre, and he slashes from the wrist — that's a Polish technique.
  • Various references can be found in paintings (Danse Macabre), sculptures (Venus figurines) and fashion (selectively chosen items, clothes and styles from XV and XVIc. fashion).
  • This even extends to botanic matters — for example the flowers and plants found in Toussaint also grow in Southern France — the Real Life equivalent of said region.
• World in Conflict does a frankly superb job of depicting downtown Seattle circa 1989. This would be expected if Massive Entertainment was one of the multiple developers based in the area, but they're Swedish. They even play with it by having the invading Soviets blow up the Kingdome, which was demolished in reality a few years before the game's release.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: At one point in the game, Mythra, a Light-element Blade, goes up against someone who can move at light speed. As last resort, Mythra calls upon her Humongous Mecha's Wave-Motion Gun, said opponent dodges it. They point out that the Wave-Motion Gun is a particle accelerator, which shoots something that technically has mass, and thus moves slower than light. However, a few minutes later Pyra uses Siren's targeting laser to threaten to destroy herself; not only does the laser actually move at light speed, but the only difference between a targeting laser and a weaponized laser is the amount of power you put into it.
• Xenogears did more than their share of homework when it comes to depicting the Gnostic religion. Extra surprising when you consider Japan's usual accuracy when it comes to Christian topics.
• The Xenosaga games have vast in-game databases that are updated with both real world and fictional information on matters biographical, historical and scientific.
  • More importantly, nearly all of the technobabble in Xenosaga is real or at least researched — you couldn't really use the EPR paradox for FTL communication, but how many RPGs would even suggest you could?
• Zniw Adventure: The dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are well-researched to be up-to-date with modern paleontology, with the in-game encyclopedia providing real-life facts.

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