How Video Games Recreate Real Places and Landscapes

Some games do not invent their worlds but recreate real ones, rebuilding actual cities, landscapes, and even the whole planet in enough detail to be recognisable. The ambition and the craft behind these recreations are remarkable, and for anyone who loves a real place, seeing it rebuilt in a game is a strange and genuine pleasure worth understanding.

Cities rebuilt stone by stone

The Assassin's Creed games are the best-known example, recreating Renaissance Florence, revolutionary Paris, and ancient Alexandria in detail precise enough that historians have praised them. Walking through a game's version of a city you know, or one you have read about, and finding the real landmarks where they should be, is an uncanny experience, and the effort required to rebuild a historical city this faithfully is enormous.

The whole planet, to scale

Microsoft Flight Simulator took the idea to its extreme by recreating the entire Earth, drawing on real satellite and mapping data so that you can fly over your own house. It is less a game than a recreation of the world, and the ability to take off from a real airport, fly a real route, and recognise the real terrain below is a genuinely astonishing use of the technology.

Why recreate a real place

Recreating a real place serves different purposes in different games. In a historical game it grounds the story in a world players can believe, in a driving game it lets you drive roads you know, and in a flight simulator it is the whole point. In every case, the recognition, that is a real place, I have been there, or I have always wanted to go, adds a layer of meaning that an invented world cannot.

The uncanny pleasure of recognition

There is a specific delight in finding a place you know inside a game, turning a corner and recognising a street, a building, a view. For people who live somewhere a game recreates, it can be strangely moving to see their own city rendered and explorable, and for people who love a place from afar, it is a way to walk its streets without the journey. That recognition is a pleasure unique to recreated places.

Accuracy and its limits

No recreation is perfect, and the honest ones take necessary liberties, compressing distances, simplifying layouts, filling gaps where the real data runs out. A recreated city is a portrait, not a photograph, capturing the essence and the landmarks while smoothing the rest, and understanding that keeps the experience honest. The goal is recognisability and feeling, not survey-grade precision, and the best recreations know where to spend their accuracy.

History you can walk through

Recreations of historical places do something textbooks cannot: they let you walk through the past. Assassin's Creed Origins even includes a mode that strips out the game to let you tour its recreation of ancient Egypt as a museum, and wandering a reconstructed ancient city, seeing how people lived and how the place fit together, teaches history in a way that reading about it rarely matches.

A tool for more than play

These recreations increasingly serve purposes beyond entertainment. Architects, historians, and educators have used game recreations of places to study, teach, and plan, because an explorable three-dimensional model of a real place is genuinely useful. The craft developed to recreate places for games turns out to have value well outside them, which is a nice vindication of the effort.

Inspiring the real journey

For many players, exploring a recreated place sparks the desire to see the real one. A game's version of a city can be the thing that finally puts it on someone's travel list, or deepens their appreciation of a place they already love. Far from replacing travel, these recreations often feed the appetite for it, which is a reminder that a virtual place and a real one can complement rather than compete.

A remarkable thing to be able to do

It is worth stepping back to appreciate how extraordinary it is that we can now rebuild real cities and landscapes, and even the whole planet, in enough detail to explore them. The games that recreate real places are one of the more quietly impressive achievements of the medium, and for anyone who loves the real world's places, the chance to walk through them rebuilt, from anywhere, is a genuine and modern marvel.

Seeing your own world rebuilt

There is a particular pleasure reserved for finding somewhere you know personally inside one of these recreations, a home city, a place you once lived, a landscape you grew up near. Flight Simulator in particular makes this possible almost anywhere, and flying over your own neighbourhood from the other side of a screen is a strange, affecting thing. It is a reminder that these recreations are not just about famous places; increasingly, they can hand almost anyone the odd gift of seeing their own corner of the world rebuilt.