Artistic License Geography / Video Games

• In Battlefield 4, many features of the small island nation of Singapore have been seriously goofed up, probably best summarized by the fact that the map in question is based on the multiplayer level "Siege of Shanghai". The most egregious one being the distance between Tombstone's landing site to their objective. The Marines land around the Central Business District located at the mouth of the Singapore River and make their way towards Chinese-controlled Changi International Airport, which in reality it is at least 12–15 kilometres east, from the southern tip all the way to the extreme eastern part of the island nation (notwithstanding urban jungle in-between). In the level proper, the airport is depicted inexplicably sitting right next to the city, within perfect viewing distance from the landing site.
• Diacrisis: Excellor Supermax Security Penitentiary is located on the Nunavut border. The problem? It's called the Nunavut border in 1985! Nunavut didn't become its own province until April 1st, 1999.
• Railroad Tycoon 3 includes a mission to build a railroad over the Rocky Mountains... Between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. Those are the Sierra-Nevada mountains, by the way.
• Hilariously parodied by Backyard Hockey, which says that Buddy Cheque came from the town of Janestown, which, they say, is near the geographically impossible border of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Canada.
• In Rad Racer, you're racing in the "Trans America'' competition, but one of the tracks is set in ancient Greek ruins.
• In Rad Mobile, when you arrive in Chicago you'll see palm trees and a gigantic cruise ship on what is presumably Lake Michigan.
• Resistance 2 has a secret military bunker on Yerba Buena Island. When you exit the bunker The Bay Bridge has suspiciously been painted red.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater's Soviet jungle. Even allowing for the fact that the Soviet Union wasn't just Russia, the Turkic ex-republics of the Soviet Union are very arid. It's, you know, in the middle of the world's largest continent, and the only (faux-)seashores are the western Caspian coast of Turkmenistan (western coasts tend to be arid throughout the world) and the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan is steppe country, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are mostly desert, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are mountainous. No jungles, anywhere. Same for Zanzibarland in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, said to be in the "former Soviet Union". Conversely, there is a real archipelago called Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, which does have jungles.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series: Abound in almost all missions that feature major cities and/or landmark structures. The most egregious example is probably the final Allied mission in Yuri's Revenge, where the 1000-or-so-kilometer distance between Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula is compressed into about 1.
• Command & Conquer: Generals: At one moment in USA campaign, we witness an American aircraft carrier in the waters of the Caspian Sea. The thing is, that "sea" is actually a lake, and only has small-sized canals to the ocean not fitting for a carrier. Cue the thoughts of how that ship could get there in the first place.
• Age of Empires III has the Netherlands as one of its playable countries. The capital, Amsterdam, is depicted with a mountain range in the background. It isn't called the Low Countries for nothing.
• Let's Go Find El Dorado features great mountain peaks separating cities and rivers with random names on them. As such, you can go from Santa Fe, New Mexico, fly over the mountains, and end up in Panama City. Yep.
• Halo 3 not only has jungles in the Tsavo area of Kenya, but also temperate plants native to the Pacific Northwest. Mt. Kilimanjaro looks more like Mt. Rainier, and is far too close for the location, which is on the opposite side of the country. The jungles of Tsavo may be forgivable, seeing as Halo takes place 500 years in the future, and mankind may have done a bit of terraforming. No excuse for the moving mountain, however.
• Rival Turf has a pretty bad one. The game is supposedly set in Los Angeles, yet the level screen shows a map of Canada.
• Need for Speed:
  • II features the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, and Uluru. All on the same track.
  • III has a track set in a Grand Canyon-type area, with an underground Greek temple.
• Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones starts with the Hero on a boat, sailing to Babylon. He sails past a couple of huge rocks and spots his besieged and burning city. The problem is that Babylon was in what is now Iraq, which is a fairly flat country, so there are no huge rocks in the river.
• While mostly faithful to actual geography, Empire Earth at times goes happy-go-lucky on perspectives. Examples include cities changing locations from a mission to another, Alexandria spreading over the whole Nile delta, or Brittany being completely obliterated from the map of France in the Roman campaign.
• In Soldier of Fortune II, there's a Mayan pyramid in the Colombian jungle.
• The Knight Rider NES game overlaps this and Hollywood Atlas. For instance, at the end of the Miami level, cacti appear on the side of the roads. The Houston level is set in a desert, complete with cacti appearing. The St. Louis level has the landmark arch on a hill and in a village setting. However, in real life, it's in the downtown area by the river on common ground. Phoenix has the Grand Canyon in the background when it is practically on the other end of the state.
• Generally averted, but still lampshaded in the Uncharted series, particularly in the third game.
  Sully: Only you could find a jungle in the middle of France.
• Likely deliberate, but still quite noticeable in No More Heroes, namely in the positioning of Santa Destroy. Driving around will find the border with Mexico, and the city is on the coast, likely overwriting the existence of a little town called San Diego.
• Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask takes place in the city of Monte d'Or, which is located in a desert... in the United Kingdom, somewhere that doesn't have any deserts at all.
• If you're on pogo.com and playing a hidden-object game set in London, expect numerous localization errors such as American power points in shops, and American fire hydrants on the streets.
• In World Driver Championship for the N64, one of the tracks is in Sydney, Australia. The start/finish line is at Sydney Airport. Most of the lap runs through the city of Sydney... and then towards the end of the lap, you get off the Sydney Harbour Bridge and find yourself driving through the Barkly Tablelands, in the Northern Territory, before arriving back at the airport. Google Earth approximates a 34-hour drive from one to the other. A good car in the game should be able to do an entire lap in, give or take, 1 minute 40 seconds.
• Ogre Battle has Kastro Valley. According to the town of Almalyk, the Kastro Valley is, quote: "580 baums long, 75 baums wide, and 1.8 baums deep" and a baum is: "the distance an adult walks in 1500 minutes," or 25 hours. Assuming an average speed of three miles an hour, that gives us dimensions of 43,500 miles long, 5,625 miles wide, and 135 miles deep. Assuming an Earth-like planet, that's a length nearly twice the circumference and depth enough to go well into the mantle. It's roughly one hundred times the area of the Amazon basin. Dividing the size of a baum by ten still gives us a problematic (but handwaveable depth) but a much more reasonable, Amazon-basin-sized area.
• In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, many of the Caribbean islands and coastlines are depicted as rocky and mountainous. In real life, they're mostly quite flat. For example, compare Crooked Island◊ in the game to its real-world counterpart.◊
• Strangely enough, given that Penn and Teller specifically made Desert Bus to be "stupefyingly like reality," the shape and length of the road from Tucson to Las Vegas, while stupefying, are not entirely "like reality." The road is not entirely straight, and it's more than 360 miles long.
• The map of Europe and North Africa in Medieval II: Total War is accurate enough. However, once the player finally acquires the technology to cross the Atlantic they will find that the land on the other side does not match reality at all in either location or scale. It also doesn't help that the turn-based system results in an Atlantic crossing that takes about 20 years of game time.
• Super Hang-On has you driving on cross-country highways to tour entire continents. Except the highways never have junctions, definitely do not curve in accordance with real-world geography, and are far shorter than what they would be if they were to scale.
• OutRun 2019 has Stage 3, "Around The World", with each route representing a country; the closed network of roads can take you through Sicily, the Mediterranean coast, Hong Kong, Antarctica, and various other corners of the world without your car ever having to ride a ferry or take more than 10 minutes to make the entire trip. Granted, your car can drive up to 692 mph^note in the North American version; other versions of the game alter the units so that it's 692 km/h or 430 km/h, but even at that speed it would still take a few hours at the least just to travel across a modestly-sized country in real life.
• Criminal Case: World Edition has a pretty fluid idea about how far the areas are from each other, and takes a lot of liberty to make the player go back and forth between the locations as if they're just a few minutes away when they are not. For example, when the player is told to go to India, they are sent to New Delhi, but the actual crime scene is in the Taj Mahal, which is in Agra — 180 km away from the capital city. And one of the suspects is a kid who offers elephant ride from the 108-feet Hanuman Statue, in Shimla — which is even farther away (557 km from Agra).
• The original version of Microsoft Train Simulator had six default routes, based on real-life lines, but didn't exactly look like the real world counterparts.
  • For instance, the original Marias Pass route^note a depiction of the BNSF Hi-Line Subdivision from Shelby to Whitefish, Montana via Marias Pass didn't accurately portray any of the many high trestles on this portion of the route. For instance, Goat's Lick Trestle near Essex is depicted as a small ditch rather than as a high trestle over a ravine. Same goes for the trestle at Java Creek, which is depicted as an ordinary bridge rather than a trestle.
  • Consequently, third-party users have made a point of going in and making modified versions of the default MSTS routes, altering the scenery and tracks to better resemble what actually exists there.
• Notably averted in the True Crime games. These games use actual maps of Los Angeles and New York City, so distances between points are roughly accurate. However, locations of actual places in the game? Not so accurate.
• This is also the case with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The maps are completely randomized apart from few specific Council Missions and some DLC missions, and only a handful have small changes depending on location. This means that you may stumble upon a research facility surrounded by a pine forest in India.
• In the first Mass Effect, you can't travel to Earth, but you can travel to Earth's moon, where Earth will be visible above the horizon. Although you have to look hard to see through the clouds, once you make out the landmasses it becomes obvious that the image is backwards. The Gulf of Mexico is apparently west of Mexico and east of Florida.
• Forza Horizon 3 takes some major liberties with Australian geography. For example, Surfers Paradise and Byron Bay are separated by Victoria's Great Ocean Road. Word of God is that they are fully aware of the inaccuracies and that it was done in order to fit as many different biomes onto the map as they could.
  • Ditto for Forza Horizon 5, which features things such as the pyramids of Teotihuacán right next to the greenhouse farmlands of Tapalpa, Jalisco — in reality, both are about 600 km apart. Likewise, the city of Guanajuato in the game is right next to the Gran Caldera volcano, when in reality, this city and the Popocatépetl volcano are also about 600 km apart.
• At one point in Street Fighter V's story mode, a character drives into Rio De Janeiro on an ATV, picks up two other characters - one of whom is unconscious and presumably dying - and drives off. The next time we see them, they're crashing that same ATV through a window... in London. Wild Mass Guessing notwithstanding, the obvious implication is that they somehow drove that ATV several thousand miles northeast and across an ocean, and did so fast enough for their incapacitated passenger to be in the exact same state she was in when they left Rio. In a game revolving around superpowered martial artists, this may be the strangest thing that happens, which is saying something.
• A similar kerfuffle to the above occurs in Wolfenstein: The New Order, where Blazkowicz just finished destroying Nazi forces in London only to hear that the rebel's home base is under attack in Berlin. He gets a pick-up from a friend and the two make the drive in literal minutes as it's still going on, despite the ocean channel and several hours of miles between the two. Even in a charitable circumstance of taking a bridge, this is a Nazi-occupied Bad Future where gunning through their checkpoints is tantamount to suicide.
• On the map accompanying the Tower Bridge stage of Super Pang, Tower Bridge is shown as being somewhere in Lancashire — over 200 miles from London.
• In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Whiterun region is described by in-universe sources as being a "tundra." However, the defining feature of tundra is permafrost, which prevents trees and tall grass from growing. And while Whiterun doesn't have many trees, they do grow throughout the hold along with tall grass, meaning that it's impossible for the region to be a tundra.
  • Also in the series, the capital province of Cyrodiil is located in a tropical zone (Nirn is not exactly a planet as such, but otherwise obeys most geographical conventions). The first few games thus described it as a jungle-heavy area, which fits since its immediate neighbors include a coastal desert (Elsweyr), warm marshy regions (Black Marsh) and a Middle Eastern Fantasy Counterpart Culture (Hammerfell) - Skyrim is behind a high mountain range, and the truly cold continent of Atmora is further north yet. Then The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out and made it a bog-standard Medieval European Fantasy setting. They had to pull a Cosmic Retcon with A Wizard Did It to explain that one.
• Even though Arkham City is located in Massachusetts according to the Mythos, it's moved to the west coast in Super Robot Wars UX to make crossovers with Heroman easier. The same goes for Innsmouth.
• Fallout 76 takes place in and around West Virginia, but unlike previous entries in the series which generally limited their geographic distortion to Space Compression, 76 is closer to The Theme Park Version than a faithful recreation. Numerous major towns and landmarks are either in the wrong place, merged together, or missing entirely, sometimes for seemingly no reason.
• Played for Laughs in both South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured but Whole where Canada is directly next to the border of South Park, Colorado.
• Days Gone takes place in the Cascade Range of central Oregon and its large open world features a number of real-life landmarks like lakes, mountains and towns. These places' positions relative to each other are complete fiction, however. Most obviously, the higher peaks of the Oregon Cascades are dotted all over the map, when in reality they exist more or less in a single-file north-south line.
  • In addition, the western half of the map appears more arid and desert-like, when in fact the reverse is true—the entire map appears to be west of the Three Sisters, the highest mountains in the region, and Oregon's high desert only begins on the eastern slopes of those mountains, well outside the playable area in the other direction.
  • Another egregious example is the inclusion of Lost Lake, which sits smack in the middle of the game's map despite actually being located about a hundred miles north on the slopes of Mt. Hood.
• In City Connection, Stage 11 is set on Easter Island, with its signature Moai statues, but also includes Mesoamerican temples.
• The maps in The Crew and its sequel are heavily condensed versions of the United States, although that still doesn't excuse why Las Vegas is so much further from its real life location, or why Florida and Michigan are so misshapen that they barely resemble their real-life counterparts. Plus, the games frequently get topograhical features wrong, particularly by placing mountains and hills in what is really flatlands, but this was likely to spice up the map and make it more interesting, given that much of the US is notoriously flat Flyover Country.
• SSX Tricky has an easily-missed instance of this. Merqury City Meltdown, an urban snowboarding course, is explicitly located in East Coast USA - and is clearly based on New York City. However, the level uses the skyline of Hong Kong as a background, as evidenced by the distinctive Bank of China tower being plainly visible. The rest of the level can be excused by Rule of Cool.
• Burnout 3: Takedown: The Far East tracks are clearly supposed to take place in Thailand, or a No Communities Were Harmed equivalent (Golden City looks like Bangkok, plus the Thai writing, the Tuk-Tuks, the nearby tropical jungles, and everyone driving on the left side of the road; not to mention, the camera zooming in to Southeast Asia in career mode). However, when you get to the Docklands course, the signs are all written in Chinese characters, not used in any official capacity in Thailand or any bordering country. It's not clear if this is a case of Interchangeable Asian Cultures or an indication that Space Compression is in play and that particular area is supposed to be Hong Kong.
• In The Last of Us, at the end of the Pittsburgh portion of the game, Joel and Ellie encounter the Allegheny river which is characterized as a raging river. However, this section of the actual river is actually quite calm most times of the year with the exception of during major rainstorms. More outrageously they find themselves a mile or so down the Ohio river with the Pittsburgh to their east. To their west is what appears to be an ocean or a large bay with no mountains in sight. Guess Ohio doesn't exist in this world.
• According to a road sign, the service station in Obduction originally stood in Riggsville, at the junction of US-19 and US-71. Thing is, odd-numbered US routes run north-south with the route numbers increasing as you go west; US-19 and US-71 are never less than 500 miles apart.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) largely takes place in the nation of Urzikstan, which is located on a peninsula in the Black Sea that doesn’t exist in the real world. Despite this, the people there speak Arabic, the name is Turkic and the climate and landscape are desert. All of this is a far cry from the temperate, sub-tropical landscape of the Caucasus region they’re right next door to. To make matters worse, one of the multiplayer maps suggests that the Euphrates river flows through Urzikstan. A river that flows through the actual nations of Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
• Pokémon:
  • The DLC for Pokémon Sword and Shield introduces a new area called the Crown Tundra. However, trees are plentiful even in the coldest areas; tundras are too cold year-round to support trees, meaning the Crown Tundra is not a tundra at all. There is also a lot of tall grass, which tundra climates don’t have either.
  • In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, while the Alabaster Icelands (Pure White Tundra in the original Japanese, and the ancient equivalent to the aforementioned Snowpoint City) are more tundra-like than the Crown Tundra, there are still too many trees in that area of Hisui to qualify as a tundra climate.
• Played for laughs in Summertime Saga. A map in one of the classrooms shows a map of "Yurup", with countries such as "Vikings" (Scandinavia), "Beer" (Germany and Austria), and "Commie Bears" (Russia and neighbors).
• In Mario Kart Tour, Uluru can be seen far in the background of Sydney Sprint. In real life, Uluru and Sydney are thousands of miles away from each other and not even in the same state of Australia (Uluru is located in Northern Territory, and Sydney is located in New South Wales). This was carried over to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe when the track was added to the game via the Booster Course Pass DLC. All the city tracks besides Singapore Speedway and Athens Dash heavily condense their cities to include as many iconic landmarks as possible.
• Viva Piñata: The map in Trouble in Paradise◊ is ridiculous in too many ways to count; most notably (and the reason why this image was uploaded), sizeable islands like New Zealand and Japan are nowhere to be seen, but hilariously, they added Iceland, a speck Northeast of Madagascar, and even what appear to be the Galapagos islands! Perhaps justified by the franchise's stylized designs.
• Life Is Strange: Before the Storm: Rachel Amber says that she comes from Long Beach, California. Later, Chloe writes in her diary that Rachel moved to Arcadia Bay from Orange County. Long Beach borders Orange County but is in Los Angeles County.
• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has a Constructed World variation in it's initial release. In the opening narration for the Breach of Demise level, it's mentioned that the party is travelling from Hyrule Castle to the Hateno Ancient Tech, which is in the exact opposite direction that they're heading. The first DLC updated it to the far more accurate Royal Ancient Tech Lab (which is just north of the Breach).
• Mah Jong Adventures from GameHouse's 150 Games Collection has some inaccuracies regarding the locations of landmarks and tourist destinations, such as the famous Pyramids of Giza being located in Aswan instead (still in Egypt, but far from Giza), the Indian landmarks Jama Masjid, Charminar, and the Taj Mahal all being located inside New Delhi (in reality, only one of those landmarks are in Delhi, Charminar is in Hyderabad whilst the Taj Mahal is in Agra), and for the most egregious one, Mountain Pine Ridge being located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (it's actually in Belize, very far away from Brazil).