Games love real places. New York has been invaded, flooded and rebuilt more times than anyone can count, and more games have been set on the Moon than on Mars. I mapped every video game that Wikidata or English Wikipedia ties to a real place: where each one is set, and where the studio that made it is based. Click a city to see its games, join the dots from studio to setting, or leave Earth altogether.
When a studio picks a real place for a game, where does it choose, and how far is that from home? Ask anyone who plays and you will hear New York, Tokyo, London and Los Angeles. The data agree, but they also show something less obvious: the world's settings are chosen by a handful of countries. Most of the games here were made in the United States, Japan or the United Kingdom, and much of the rest of the world appears mainly as a place to visit.
I could not map "every game ever". Nobody keeps that list. What I could map is every game that has an entry in Wikidata with a real narrative location, or an English Wikipedia article sorted into a "video games set in" category: 6,198 games set on Earth and 595 set in space (102 are in both). That is 3.5% of the 189,453 video games in Wikidata, and it leans hard towards famous, Western and Japanese games. Read every number on this page as "among games that someone has written up", not "among all games".
Click a dot or a country, or search above. Dots are sized by the number of games; countries are shaded by every game set (or made) anywhere inside them.
New York City is the most used real setting by a distance: 529 games, nearly twice as many as London (288) or Tokyo (276). Los Angeles (197), Paris (158) and San Francisco (158) come next, then Chicago (91) and Washington, D.C. (83). Washington would sit third if I had taken Wikidata at its word: about two hundred American league sports games (Madden, NHL, baseball) carry it as their only "narrative location", which looks like an error, and no Wikipedia category agrees, so I set those links aside.
The most used real cities
Games set in each city (Wikidata and Wikipedia combined, each game counted once per city)
By country, the United States is the setting for 2,636 games, 43% of all the Earth-bound games here. Japan follows with 1,179 and the United Kingdom with 904, then France, Italy, Russia (counting the Soviet Union), Germany and China. Egypt, with 309, is the most used setting in Africa or the Middle East: pyramids and tombs are almost a genre of their own.
For 5,687 of the Earth-set games (92%) I could say where they were made: 4,470 from the coordinates of the developer's headquarters, 230 from the developer's country and 987 from the game's country of origin. The United States made 1,817 of them, Japan 1,361 and the United Kingdom 738. France (305) and Canada (286) are next; no other country passes 150.
Where set against where made
Games set in each country (left) and made in it (right), the 14 biggest
Put the two maps together and the routes appear. The busiest route from studio to setting crosses the Pacific: 467 games made in Japan are set in the United States. British studios sent 358 games to America, and American studios sent 222 to Britain. The fourth busiest route runs from the United States to Russia (153 games, counting the Soviet Union), and Canada's studios set 151 games across their southern border.
From studio to setting
Games made in each country (rows) and set in each country (columns); circles sized by games
American studios set 63% of their placed games at home, Japanese studios 55%. Everyone else mostly looks abroad: 38% for British studios, 29% for French, 23% for Canadian and 22% for Swedish. British studios set more games in the United States (358) than in Britain (262).
Share of each country's games set at home
Countries with at least 40 placed games whose maker is known; a game set in several countries counts as home if any of them is home
The reverse is starker. Of the 295 games set in Egypt whose maker I could place, none were made in Egypt. Monaco has 118 games, almost all of them Formula One, and none made there. Mexico (2 of 235 made at home), Greece and Hong Kong are the same story. Even Italy, Germany, Russia and China, which all have games industries, made under a tenth of the games set in them. Only Japan (64%) and the United States (43%) make a large share of the games set in them; the United Kingdom (31%) and Poland follow at a distance.
Set there, made elsewhere
Countries with at least 60 placed games whose maker is known: the share made in the country itself
Settings follow fashions. Of the games released in the 1990s, 46% were set at least partly in the United States; in the 2010s 41%, and so far in the 2020s 35%. Tokyo's share nearly doubled, from 3.3% of 1990s games to 6.1% of 2010s games, while Los Angeles peaked in the 1990s at 4.2%. Egypt has faded steadily, from 7.2% of 1980s games to 3.3% in the 2010s. Moscow and the Soviet Union were most popular while the Cold War was still on: 5.5% of 1980s games, against 1.8% so far this decade.
Share of each decade's games set in a place
By release decade; a game counts for a place if it is set there at all. 1969 to 1979 left out (only 7 placed games)
Wikipedia also sorts games by the period they are set in, which gives 2,986 games a setting date. 444 are set between 1947 and 1991, 93 in a year of the Second World War and 819 in 2027 or later. You can filter the map by these periods above.
When games are set
Games whose Wikipedia categories give a year, decade or century, by period (a game can fall in more than one)
904 games are set somewhere in the United Kingdom, 15% of the Earth-bound total. London takes 288, England as a whole 271 and Scotland 116, far more than Wales (28). Below that the counties appear in ones and twos, mostly because Wikipedia has a category for them. Of the British settings whose maker is known, 31% were made in Britain; American studios made 222 and Japanese studios 132.
British studios made 738 placed games. The busiest studio towns, judging by the nearest large town to each developer's headquarters, are London (81), the Coventry area (63, home of Codemasters' racing games), Derby (37, Core Design's Tomb Raider), Manchester and Liverpool. Codemasters alone accounts for 44.
Britain on both sides
Left: British places used as settings. Right: where British-made games are set
595 games are set somewhere off Earth that is real. Most of them are simply in "outer space" (400, including games set on spacecraft and in the Solar System at large). Of the real bodies, the Moon leads with 119 games against 85 for Mars. Saturn's moon Titan has 16, Venus 5, Jupiter's moons 2 (Io and Callisto), and the Sun and Mercury one each. No game in either source is tagged with the International Space Station. Click a world to list its games.
The Moon and Mars, by release decade
Games set on each, by the decade of first release
Two sources, built in different ways. Wikidata records a "narrative location" for some games; English Wikipedia sorts articles into categories such as "Video games set in Tokyo". They overlap less than you might expect: 2,610 of the Earth-set games are placed by both, 2,780 only by Wikipedia and 808 only by Wikidata. Wikipedia's categories carry most of the weight, so the map mostly shows what English-language editors have chosen to categorise.
Games. Wikidata items that are an instance of video game or one of its subclasses (189,453 items, retrieved through QLever on 28 October 2026). Release year is the earliest publication date. Wikipedia articles are matched to Wikidata through their sitelinks; only articles that are video games in Wikidata are kept.
Where set. Wikidata narrative location (P840), kept when the place has coordinates on Earth or is a real body or region of space; 688 narrative locations (fictional places such as Raccoon City and Black Mesa, and abstract ones) are left out. Wikipedia: the 823 categories under "Video games by setting" whose names say "set in" or "set on". Each name is classified: 475 name a real place, 274 a date, 7 somewhere in space, and 64 a kind of place (castles, hotels, the future). Places are geocoded offline: the category's Wikidata topic, then a Wikidata place with the same name, then a Natural Earth country, then a short hand list (US states at their capitals, English counties at their county towns, Japanese prefectures at their main city, historical states at their capital or core), then GeoNames. Three names could not be placed (Easter Island, Ascension Island, Northumberland). Every place records where its location came from.
Most specific place. If a game is set in a city and also in that city's country, the country link is set aside so the game is not counted twice; continents and oceans are set aside when anything finer exists. These and the Washington links make 1,897 set-aside links, all kept in the data with the reason. Historical states are mapped to the modern country that contains their point (the Soviet Union to Russia, the Roman Empire to Italy). 398 games are placed only at a continent or ocean level and appear in counts but not as dots.
Where made. For each game, the developer with known headquarters coordinates (the one with the most games if there are several); else the developer's country; else the game's country of origin. Headquarters are where the company is now, not necessarily where it was when it made the game, and big publishers' internal studios are often recorded at the parent's address. Studio towns are the largest GeoNames town within 15 km of the headquarters point. For 511 Earth-set games neither source gives a maker's location.
Not covered. This is not every game ever made: most of the 189,453 games in Wikidata have no setting recorded, and many games have no Wikidata item at all. Coverage is far better for well-known games from North America, Europe and Japan, and for English-language Wikipedia's interests (sport, war and history games are richly categorised). Sports games add many links: the 22 yearly Formula One games and managers in the data (F1 2000 onwards) are each filed under a median of 19 places from that season's calendar. I set aside 202 Wikidata links that tie league sports games to Washington, D.C. (see section 02). Fictional cities that stand in for real ones (Liberty City for New York, Vice City for Miami) are not counted as the real city.
Games, places, developers and countries: Wikidata (CC0), queried through QLever (University of Freiburg) on 28 October 2026. Settings: English Wikipedia, category tree under "Category:Video games by setting" (category names and page titles), English Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0. Country outlines: Natural Earth 1:50m admin 0 (public domain). Towns and some place locations: GeoNames cities15000 (CC BY 4.0). Hill shading: computed from AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen terrarium; sources include SRTM, GMTED and ETOPO1). Optional base maps and satellite tiles: Tiles © Esri (Esri, HERE, Garmin, USGS, NGA, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, © OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS user community).