Black Vikings / Video Games

• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed Origins has The Duelist, a Chinese gladiatrix in the Roman province of Cyrene and one of Bayek's opponents in the arena. While there was some contact between Ancient Rome and China, this happened long after the time span of the game's events.
  • Similar to the Origins example above, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has a character named Yanli, a Chinese merchant from the Tang dynasty who ended in Europe and met an English stablemaster named Rowan. Not only was there no European contact with China in the 9th century with the exception of the Byzantine Empire, but it's extremely unlikely for any Chinese person to end up in England given the vast geography needed to cross between continents and lack of knowledge at the time. The "River Raids" expansion adds Vagn, who plays this trope straight, though he doesn't join Eivor on their pillaging due to years of fighting had worn him down.
• The Nazi GGG Ghostapo organization in BloodRayne has an Asian woman as one of its leaders. Vaguely semi-justified in that she's Tibetan, and the Nazi racial science considered Tibetans to be an Aryan race. Oh, and she's also half-vampire, which the GGG seems to consider a plus.
• A funny example is Civilization, which favors Cosmetically Different Sides: a pikeman from one nation looks identical to a pikeman from another, bar maybe a few color-coded bits. Furthermore, the majority of units look roughly Caucasian. On the other hand, unique units tend to look in line with their country's ethnicity. This can lead to the surrealness of, say, playing as Zulu, building a white spearman, upgrading them into a black Impi, and then upgrading them again into a white rifleman. However, this is first fixed in Civilization IV's expansions, which introduce multiple graphical sets for generic units.
• Crusader Kings II:
  • It's possible (though updates have made it more difficult) to turn your dynasty into the most literal version of this trope. Some figurative versions are significantly easier.
  • One event for the northern Italian merchant republics guarantees one of your sons will end up falling in love with, and possibly marrying, a West African woman, making the possibility of a doge two or three elections down the line being of clearly African descent non-negligible.
  • Court Physicians are frequently wanderers from faraway lands — it's not uncommon to find, say, a Pecheneg in Spain because of this. Said physicians are guaranteed to be Christian, however, and with their extremely high education in matters medical and theological, they can rise very high in the church, even becoming Pope fairly often.
  • The A.I. has a bad habit of letting skilled foreigners educate their children after giving them the heritage focus. Resulting in things like, say say, the Andalusian (but still Christian) Sultan of France. And any minor courtiers said Sultan generates will be ethnically as well as culturally Andalusian.
• Dragalia Lost has Addis, a black samurai as a retainer for Ieyasu of the Boar Clan, one of the Twelve Wyrmclans of Hinomoto (the game's version of Japan). In this case, he's based on Yasuke.
• Fate/Grand Order toys with this in the concept of "Pseudo-Servants": Heroic Spirits whose actual selves cannot become Servants, frequently but not always Divine Spirits, will instead appear in the likeness of an otherwise un-heroic mortal who has indirectly contacted the Holy Grail. This is the lore reason why Chinese tactician Zhuge Liang appears as a stuffy British professor (or a stuffy British teenager), why Sumerian goddess Ishtar appears as a Japanese teenage girl, etc.
• The Imperivm franchise follows the already common trend of portraying almost everybody in Carthage as black people, most egregiously the Numidians.
• Metal Gear:
  • Averted and lampshaded in Metal Gear Solid: Naomi, while discussing her background, mentions that her Japanese-American grandfather was an FBI agent under Hoover. Master Miller later tells Snake that was one of several inconsistencies in said background that made him realize she was lying: J. Edgar Hoover was a notorious racist and he never would've allowed a man of Japanese descent as an agent.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3, a African-American man named Donald Anderson, codenamed 'Sigint', was recruited by Zero in 1960s America for his skill and not because of his skin color. Notable in that Sigint was recruited during the final year of Jim Crow Laws, which barred black people from using the same facilities as whites in America. This is addressed by Sigint in an optional conversation, where he expresses his admiration for Zero as a committed non-racist who'll hire anyone good enough and bend the rules to keep them there. He discusses the racism present during that time and comments that racism will be present even in the twenty-first century. (Sigint's character was likely inspired by the African-American "computers" who worked on Space Race projects in the 1950s and 60s — but in real history, these computers were usually black women, computing usually being seen as a feminine/secretarial job.)
• Subverted in Nioh, which has the "Obsidian Samurai", an African samurai during Japan's Warring States Period which caused many to accuse the game of this trope. In truth, Oda Nobunaga really did have an African man as one of his retainers, who had originally come to Japan enslaved as part of a missionary trip. That said, it's been debated whether or not Yasuke was an actual samurai^*Yasuke was known to have served as a sword-bearer (koshō) and was given a stipend, a short sword, and a house upon becoming a vassal of the Oda clan, but few details are known about him, complicated by his short stay in Japan (less than three years)., so his depiction here potentially falls under Politically Correct History.
• The shrine at Kiersau Abbey in Pentiment depicts St. Moritz as a black knight and characters state he was an Egyptian serving in the Roman Legion. This is accurate to late Medieval and Renaissance depictions of him.
• Resident Evil:
  • Subverted in Resident Evil 0 where the Umbrella Training Facility, which operated in the late 1960s, explicitly states their goal is to find the best candidates regardless of gender, race, or creed. In spite of this, every high-ranking member of the international company is clearly a white man or woman (though it's hinted Morpheus Duvall may have had gender-reassignment surgery).
  • Enforced in Resident Evil 5: There are an awful lot of white people in Africa because people complained about the bad optics with all the Majini being black. Then again, there are an awful lot of white people in Africa if you know where to look. The Majini become less diverse once the action leaves the town of Kijuju, because from there the human enemies you meet either belonged to the native Ndipaya tribe or to a RUF-like mercenary outfit before they were infected.
• Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love features Sagitta Weinberg/Cheiron Archer, an African-American female lawyer in The Roaring '20s; while college-educated black professionals were far from unheard of since the early 1900s, what's odd is that this character never has to fight prejudice or racism in the series (which instead would have been likely). Even for an Alternate History, this is just stretching it a bit.
• An interesting example in the Soulcalibur games with Zasalamel. Zasalamel is black, and while his country of origin is never directly stated, it's implied that he's supposed to be Sumerian, as many of his moves have names that reference the Sumerian gods. Granted, since he's an immortal who reincarnates every time he's killed, it's entirely possible that the body he appears with is not his original. That said, his ending in IV, where he is in the modern era, several hundred years after the game's events, shows Zasalamel still in the same body. While the implication is that he merely comes back to life each time he dies, and doesn't body hop when he reincarnates, it's unclear if Zasalamel was truly able to break his "curse of immortality", his goal in III. (All that's stated in IV is that the power of the soul swords gave him a vision of the future later seen in his ending.) It wouldn't be until many years later, in Soulcalibur VI, that Zasalamel would definitely state that he's reincarnated as people of various ethnicities (and genders) over the course of his long life.