History Main / VideoGameHistoricalRevisionism

* ''VideoGame/MafiaIII'', set in a [[NoCommunitiesWereHarmed fictionalized version]] of UsefulNotes/NewOrleans in [[TheSixties 1968]], is better with this, at least partly because it's set towards the end of the decade when most of the events and pop culture trends that defined "the '60s" had already happened. The biggest break from history is that the mixed-race PlayerCharacter can get in trouble with the law if he walks into whites-only establishments that have signs reading "No Coloreds Allowed". The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed four years before the game takes place, outlawed such discrimination. This has an in-universe justification, however; historically, many segregationist business owners fiercely opposed the law and refused to comply with it[[note]]In 1968, the same year in which ''Mafia III'' takes place, an attempt to desegregate a bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina led to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeburg_massacre a riot]] that left three dead and 28 wounded.[[/note]], with full enforcement only really achieved in the early '70s.

** Similarly, ''VideoGame/MedalOfHonorAirborne'' suffered from its choice of Nazi portrayal, as the [[EliteMooks elite]], [[GasMaskMooks gas-masked]], machine gun-wielding stormtroopers that were MadeOfIron could attest to. Also, in the first level you face Italian blackshirts, who speak their own language but carry German weapons and are intentionally programmed to be [[ArtificialStupidity much worse fighters]] than the German soldiers who take over for them after ten minutes.

** Another mission involves recovering an Enigma cypher machine from the German cruiser ''Lützow'', which was abandoned by her crew after taking heavy damage but failed to sink as expected. This is presumably intentional AlternateHistory, as the real ''Lützow'' never entered Kriegsmarine service and was sold unfinished to the Soviet Union in 1940.

->''"''Genji 2'' is an action game which is based on Japanese history. Being based on history, the stages of the game will also be based on famous battles which actually took place in ancient Japan. So, here's this GiantEnemyCrab..."''

** In ''Hidden & Dangerous 2'', one mission involves sabotage of a German aviation research facility. This has for some strange reason been located in the Lofoten islands in Northern Norway. In other missions, you face Italians in North Africa and Japanese in Burma. In the former case, the game makers modelled their uniforms and one aircraft type correctly, but they use German small arms and the pilots seen wear Luftwaffe uniforms. In the latter case historically correct small arms were modelled. In the expansion pack ''Sabre Squadron'', Italian troops defending Sicily were accompanied by a Tiger tank.

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' changes several historical details to subtly establish that it takes place in an alternate universe. The most notable examples is in the museum of technology, where the Apollo 13 rocket and the moon lander are renamed "Delta" and "Virgo" respecively, and the American flag has a different star motif.

** WordOfGod says that the ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' verse diverges from ours sometime after UsefulNotes/WorldWar2, though there's examples going even further back (such as a voice recording of UsefulNotes/AbrahamLincoln, who died 12 years before the invention of the phonograph.)

* ''VideoGame/DynastyWarriors'' features this to varying degrees throughout the series. Most visibly through the weapons and armour of the playable characters, in which several of them were not only not native to China but actually weren't even invented until several centuries later (since the setting takes place during the second and third centuries). It's almost certain none of the female characters ever fought, and very few personalities in the game are on spec with what is generally known or thought of among historians.

** Everything that's true about Dynasty Warriors also applies to ''VideoGame/SamuraiWarriors'', though the latter takes place in the Sengoku era and while there's a myriad of materiel and characters present, most, but not all, of them subvert this somewhat by being a little more appropriate of the era that the games depict.

* ''VideoGame/DynastyWarriors'' features this to varying degrees throughout the series. Most visibly through the weapons and armour of the playable characters. It's almost certain none of the female characters ever fought, and very few personalities in the game are on spec with what is generally known or thought of among historians.

** Everything that's true about Dynasty Warriors also applies to ''VideoGame/SamuraiWarriors''.

** Don't forget the "spearmen" who simply chuck their spears at the enemy. Normal spears are weighted and balanced, so they would be nearly impossible to throw. Instead, you need a specially crafted spear known as a javelin. Therefore, the "spearmen" in the game are really just javelinmen, although ''VideoGame/{{Stronghold}}'' is hardly the first or last offender to mess this up.

** The states were consolidated back down to thirteen after the the annexation of Canada (thus the different star motif) so you can see why people give it slack about not really having anything to do with the real world.

--> -- '''Bill Ritch''' pitching the "historical realism" of ''VideoGame/{{Genji}} 2''

** In ''VideoGame/RomeTotalWar'' this trope is everywhere. By the start of the game The Selucid Empire is already a rump state, Rome controls all of the Italian Peninsula and is controlled by three families and the senate, and Hellenistic Egypt has an army that would be better situated a millinium before the game and looks like it rolled off the set of ''Film/TheMummyTrilogy''.

** Part of the British campaign in ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty 2'' takes place during the Second Battle of El Alamein, but does not feature any Italian forces, who were predominant in the area, replacing them all with Germans, even in the Italian-defended "Devil's Garden" minefields.

** In a similar vein, in the ''Call of Duty'' expansion pack ''United Offensive'', one mission revolves around sabotaging coastal defense guns in Sicily in preparation for the Allied invasion. Inexplicably, they are crewed and guarded by German soldiers. While there were in fact German soldiers participating in the defence of Sicily, it seems rather unlikely that they would man fixed coastal fortifications.

** The series has also, generally, had consistent cases where the games insist Americans were at least involved, if not [[AmericaWonWorldWarII the main fighting force]], in several battles they played a minor role in or were not involved with at all. This even extended to the [[VideoGame/MedalOfHonor2010 modern-day reboot]], where the second mission tasks the player, a Navy SEAL, to take over the air base at Bagram in Afghanistan - when the real base was taken by the British Special Boat Service.
* The FPS ''Videogame/Prey2006'' has an odd portrayal of the Cherokee tribe via the Land of the Ancients. Since the spiritual realm of the Cherokee is presented as a vast range of mountains and canyons, and the game takes place in Oklahoma, you'd probably think they're a western tribe. But the Cherokee were relocated to Oklahoma from their homelands in the southeast in the 19th century: any spiritual recreation of their native lands would look like forests and rolling hills. Perhaps Tommy's tribe was originally Sioux, and got [[CaptainErsatz switched at the last minute]]. Or then again, maybe the makers were just thinking of the [[TheMountainsOfIllinois windswept deserts of Georgia]]...
** Or it might just be a projection of the area he considers home, where his family has lived for generations.
* ''[[VideoGame/{{Battlefield}} Battlefield 1942]]'' completely ignored how its weapons were used in actual history. The assault class of each army gets a historical machine gun which functions in-game as an assault rifle, and the engineer classes get the bolt-action rifles that were really the standard-issue weapons of most armies. The worst offenders, though, are the stationary machine guns, which do not cause a whole lot of damage, and whoever uses them ''stands up straight, completely exposed to enemy fire''. Interestingly, the mod ''VideoGame/ForgottenHope'' added historical weapons, and the result was a game which was much more authentic and more fun to play.

** ''VideoGame/HeartsOfIron'' is BannedInChina for portraying the various warlords as independent. There ''is'' a Chinese government-approved version which has a unified China and removes the (illegal in China) flag of Tibet. There are also several mods which give the Third Reich its swastikas back.

*** Explanations ''are'' given for historical discrepancies not only in the first game, but in subsequent games as well: in short, history ''isn't'' actually being presented exactly as it was either in real-life or in the fictional universe of ''Assassin's Creed'', it's being presented through the FramingDevice of the Animus, which is not shows how the player character perceives the world around them (for example, Altaïr may not have actually had dozens of guards hot on his heels every single time he was noticed, but he ''felt'' like he did when he was on the run) and, in some later games, are explicitly stated to have been included in-universe because they're so iconic (the in-game encyclopedia entry for a monument in ''Black Flag'' even points out that it makes no sense for it to have been included because it postdated the setting of the game by more than a century but was included anyway because it was a major local landmark). In some cases, though, it's not given an explanation but is because of hardware limitations: namely, the attempt on Lorenzo de Medici's life takes place ''outside'' the cathedral that it took place in historically because the developers couldn't manage a scene that took place inside the church and then moved outside.