Every game is a story, every story has a setting, every setting includes a place. And sometimes, that place in a fictional videogame is a real city. And this can be really cool, for me because it helps bring my one of my favorite things (video games) into one of my least-favorite things (going places). Have you ever visited a city you've explored in a video game, or done the same thing in the opposite order, or hope to do those things? Or less-specifically, how do you feel about the concept of overlap of bringing super non-legal things like street racing and gun battles into actual places people can visit? For me, since I don't like to travel, I haven't visited the real versions of many video game cities, at least not games I've played. The most significant ones for me were Washington DC from Fallout 3 and Las Vegas from Fallout NV. I'd been to DC when I was little, and then when I played FO3 parts of it felt so nostalgic, if not also a little bit shrunken. Seeing the Washington Monument and the mall, looking up at Thomas Jefferson's statue in the Jefferson Memorial, all that stuff. And talking about getting ambushed at Anacostia subway every darn time I exit while my dad overhears and says "Yeah, it's a rough neighborhood, you shouldn't go there. Also, when did you go to DC? Also, were you robbed?", which makes me have to explain everything. And later, when a friend of mine returned home after a vacation to Las Vegas, I was able to reminisce about a lot of places I've never been. "So your flight was to McCarran airport? Did you see that huge solar array? What about the tourist trap with the giant dinosaur statue? What do you mean you didn't visit Dinky The Dinosaur?"
The first thing I could think of was visiting Manhattan after playing through Pokémon’s Castelia City. GameFreak nailed the look of the architecture. Compare both cities side by side and it they’ll look fairly similar. The crowds? Not so much. In Pokémon Black and White, the roads are wide and have tons of room to navigate the urban jungle. In real life Manhattan, most of downtown is nearly shoulder to shoulder. They also didn’t include enough taxis. I haven’t played Days Gone, but I can tell Bend Studio really put the effort into recreating the rural Oregon setting. The juniper trees, mountains, and buildings look straight out of the Cascade mountain range.
I haven't really played very many games that use real life locations. Off of the top of my head they only one I can think of is The World Ends With You, which is set in Shibuya and I've heard is a near 1-to-1 recreation of the real city (mostly just replacing copyrighted buildings and stores with brand-safe knockoffs). I'm sure if I even find myself taking a trip to Japan, I'll probably want to check out Shibuya just to see how realistic the game's depiction actually is. Of course, even if I played more of these kinds of games I probably still wouldn't actually recognize any locations. I don't really travel much so unless there's a game out there set in Portland or Salt Lake City I doubt I'll ever have the experience of recognizing a real-life location in a game or vice versa. And even then I've only been to Salt Lake a few times, meaning that it would mostly just be Portland that I would know well enough to recognize.
