History Main / UnitsNotToScale

* In ''VideoGame/ArmedPoliceBatrider'', the game's visuals are designed around the fact that the main characters ride on air bikes, rather than realistically-sized combat aircraft. The ''Battle Garegga'' ships [[OffModel look comically small compared to the objects around them, and are even smaller than the cars in Stage 1]]. And that's before considering how the Wayne brothers would be able to fit into their cabins, since there's nothing hinting in ''Garegga'' or ''Batrider'' lore that the Waynes are anything besides ordinary humans or they have any sort of technlogy or magic that can [[IncredibleShrinkingMan shrink humans]] or make the cabins BiggerOnTheInside.

** Consider these miniatures, to scale, for examples. The base represents the space occupied on a tactical map, but the miniature itself represents the person: [[https://www.amazon.com/WizKids-Dungeons-Dragons-Realms-Starter/dp/B01M1CRRY3/ref=asc_df_B01M1CRRY3 Icons of the Realm]]. [[https://www.amazon.com/WizKids-Pathfinder-Battles-Premium-Dragons/dp/B084M96N2Q/ Pathfinder Red and Black Dragons]].
* In ''Tabletopgame/BattleTech'', each hex on the playing field is 30 meters in diameter. The [[HumongousMecha battlemech]] miniatures - even without their stands - occupy a significant portion of each hex. While a Battlemech is huge, they are not ''60 meters tall'' huge; the AS7-D Atlas, one of the taller mechs, stands around 18 meters tall. The scale is even more wonky in city maps, where a Battlemech is almost as wide as an apartment building, though the ruleset that eschews hex-based movement for free-roaming units on custom, non-grid based maps can avoid the scale issue.

* The '"Franchise/{{Gundam}}'' game ''Gundam Battle Assault'' (''Gundam Battle Master'' originally) has the Quin Mantha as an example. In its [[Anime/MobileSuitGundamZZ original appearance]] the Q-Mantha is a behemoth of a Suit, comparable in size to the 40-meter tall Psyco Gundams. For its adaptation here it is bulkier and a tad bit taller than most of the other MS in the game, but completely dwarfed in size by the boss mobile armors and the Psyco Gundam Mk-III.

* TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} has a tendency to make its AnimalsNotToScale, which would be fine if the flavor text didn't describe them as being of a relatively accurate size. This is most noticeable with dinosaurs, such as the Tyrannosaurus, which is listed as Gargantuan in size, despite being barely longer (and a bit lighter) than the Huge sized Triceratops. The Giganotosaurus, which has its size inflated to 60 feet in length (in reality it was around 45 feet long and much lighter), still isn't large enough to justify its size of Colossal, given that it is only half the weight (17 tons) of the Gargantuan Brachiosaurus (32 tons), and much shorter in height and length to boot.

* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' has an interesting version of this on the meta-level when it comes to creature "sizes". They are roughly blocked out as "tiny", "small", "medium", "large", "huge" and "gargantuan". Medium creatures take up a single 5-foot-by-5-foot "square", going downwards they are decreasing percentages of a square, and upwards takes 2, 3 and 4 squares. However, there's large variance for what counts in each size: for instance, a 4'6" Dwarf and a 7'8" Goliath are both said to take up a single square. Thus, fluff-wise and for those who use miniatures, different creatures are quite to scale, but mechanically one entity could be twice the size of another and be considered "the same".

* [[ZigzaggedTrope Zigzagged]] in the ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'' games with the Infantry & Tanks Assist Trophy. They use the sprites from ''VideoGame/AdvanceWars'', meaning each infantry soldier is about the same size as the tanks. However, they are tiny compared to the playable characters, at about one-third to one-fourth the height of most of the characters.

* Continuing with Blizzard, their MassiveMultiplayerCrossover game ''VideoGame/HeroesOfTheStorm'' have almost all units that are not playable heroes noticeably downsized. For example, Jim Raynor can call piloted airships as AttackDrones, but those ships are smaller than him (which means their pilots are even smaller).

** ''VideoGame/GenealogyOfTheHolyWar'' is pretty much universally assumed in the fanbase to have the old "the guy you see is actually a unit of troops" interpretation, as it's the only real way to make its plot make sense. Due to the game's setup, the soldiers you battle tend to represent the armies of cities and fortresses, if not ''nations'', but appear to consist of a few dozen guys at most. The entire occupation army of Isaach numbers a little over sixty men, if you don't count reinforcements.

** The scale also changes completely between being outside and being inside. For example, archers are usually restricted to a range of two spaces, which results in them shooting at things from very far away when outside, but only shooting a few meters at best when inside.
** Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn were ''a little'' more realistic, but there is still the problem of units being taller than doors and jars that are larger than horses.
** The ''VideoGame/NintendoWars'' games suffer from the same problem. On the map, your soldiers are as large as ''buildings.'' Not so much on the battle screens.
*** This can be a little justified since it's not really ''a'' soldier, but a unit of many soldiers.

** The Worldbreaker skin theme which depicts champions as {{Kaiju}}-size, Mayinaztec behemoths in their splash art, but are the same size as their respective champions in the game.

* Malphite in ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' is portrayed in his splash art to be enormous, with human soldiers dwarfed by his ''hands''. In-game he's not noticeably larger than, say, Sion, who is admittedly a ''very large'' man, but nowhere on the same scale.

[[folder:Role Playing Games]]
* The ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' games, especially inside the Pokémon Gyms, which often contain several floors of seemingly complex puzzles. There's also the Pokémon Centers, buildings that are 1-story and 6 tiles big outside but are ''two'' floors of 50-60 tiles inside.
** In ''[[VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver HeartGold and SoulSilver]]'', whichever Pokémon is at the head of your party will follow you around outside. ''None'' of them are anywhere near actual size, but it's especially funny when your Wailord or Lugia isn't even twice the size of the player character.
** Pokémon also return to their Pokéball depending on their size when entering a place. For example, human sized Pokémon or smaller will follow the trainer in buildings. Larger size Pokémon, like Lugia, will be returned when entering buildings. This does NOT, however, explain how a 28' long Onix is able to fight with other similarly sized creatures in a room that doesn't look to be more than 20'x20'.
* ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' contains an especially jarring version of this - any tiny hut can turn into a dungeon the size of the whole city district the original hut was in as soon as you step in, with no explanation. The game engine models each area as an independent world affected only by scripted module variables and the things inside the area itself, with doors serving as connections, meaning that depending on what you do with the door settings you can have a hovel lead anywhere from "generic hovel interior with a generic peasant in it" to "the FinalBoss's chambers" to "test area you only put in to look at some appearances and never got around to deleting". In the area tileset itself, a lot of buildings have generic interior tiles on the City Interior set and generic exterior tiles on the appropriate exterior set - but the "interior" ones tend to be about four times larger than the "exterior" structure. In the same game, there's Klauth: canonically, he's a Great Wyrm red dragon, which should make him Colossal-size and well over a hundred feet long from nose to tail. In-game, he's ''maybe'' half that length.
* ''VideoGame/BahamutLagoon'' makes no effort to maintain any kind of consistent scale-- a castle might take up six tiles of the map one chapter, and ''be'' the map the next. Not to mention the [[PartyInMyPocket strangely absent squad members]]....
* Possibly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'', as well as one of the ''Anime/DragonBallZ: Legacy of Goku'' games, where a damaged house with no door in the frame only lets you two steps into the building instead of bringing you to an expanded map of the inside of the (ruined) house like any other building in the game.
* ''VideoGame/GranblueFantasy'': While in-battle, your playable characters are depicted as having small chibi-like proportions while the large monsters or raid bosses will take up the whole left side of the screen. Humanoid Primal Beasts are a victim of this, as they are supposed to be giants in-lore, but have their artworks ''zoomed-out'' in-game. This makes them visually small in contrast to the characters - so much that raid boss Tiamat's head is smaller than Djeeta's!
* In most {{Roguelike}}s, as well as in old-style tile-based games like the majority of the ''VideoGame/{{Ultima}}'' series, every object or creature is exactly the same size.
* In ''VideoGame/DivineDivinity'', characters and buildings are out of scale with the map, with characters traveling from one end of a kingdom to other in a very short time. The sequel mostly averts this by putting any larger-than-the-whole-building rooms underground, which is used to great effect in the second town's small inn building with an expansive 4-star hotel inside by making it out of a depleted mine.
* While ''Videogame/ShiningTheHolyArk'' only has a small overworld map this is very much in effect with your lead character dwarfing the landscape.
* In ''Videogame/WorldOfWarcraft'' bosses tend to [[LargeAndInCharge tower over other members of their own species]], with no real explanation given in-universe. Out of universe, this is so the players can easily target them even if they are being swarmed by the rest of the raid.
** Oddly present among playable races as well. Orcs are stated as averaging around seven to seven and a half feet tall but are OneHeadShorter than humans. Gnomes and Goblins are supposed to be three feet tall but compared to other races seem to be around one and a half to two feet tall.
* In ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'' Deep Space 9 is about five times bigger than it is in the show. Cryptic explained they did this because the station's canon diameter of 1451 meters is small enough that it looks silly when swarmed by player ships, [[MileLongShip many of which are about that size themselves]].
** More extreme is the relative size of your ships in space in comparison to stars and planets (which are themselves severely out of synch). 1 star is roughly twice the diameter of a planet which in turn is about twice the length of the larger ships.

[[folder:ActionAdventure]]
* LampshadeHanging in ''VideoGame/BloodOmenLegacyOfKain'', where the main character comments on the owner of a dungeon as practicing the darkest of magic because of the space distortion.
* Played straight in the ''VideoGame/StarControl'' series - not only do ships battle around "planets" (which in some cases have a smaller diameter than the length of some of the longer ships), if you pay attention, the Landers when sent down to a planet not only can travel around whole planet in moments, they're bigger than Ireland! But... can only hold twelve crewmen.

[[folder:DiggingGame]]
* In ''VideoGame/{{Repton}}'', ''VideoGame/BoulderDash'' and pretty much all games of the rocks-and-diamonds genre, ''all'' objects are the same size. Your character can pick up hundreds of diamonds that are as big as he is.

[[folder:DrivingGame]]
* The environment in the ''VideoGame/{{Wipeout}}'' hover racing games seems to be scaled to size for someone sitting at the height of the camera. This of course means that the ships are tiny or alternatively that the environment is gigantic. The first person dashboard view is only marginally lower, meaning the 'dashboard cam' sits about five metres above the roof of the other ships.

[[folder:FightingGame]]
* ''VideoGame/TransformersForgedToFight'' has all the bots being roughly the same size, which works across all versions of them, from Gen One to "[[Film/{{Transformers}} Bayformers]]". Unfortunately, it also works with ''WesternAnimation/BeastWars'' Transformers, which are multiple times shown to be only a fraction of the size of Gen One Transformers (being their smaller, more efficient, descendants). So Rhinox is still the same size as Optimus Prime.
* [[ZigzaggedTrope Zigzagged]] in the ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'' games with the Infantry & Tanks Assist Trophy. They use the sprites from ''VideoGame/AdvanceWars'', meaning each infantry soldier is about the same size as the tanks. However, they are tiny compared to the playable characters, at about one-third to one-fourth the height of most of the characters.

[[folder:PlatformGame]]
* The alien spaceship seen in {{Area 51}} in ''VideoGame/TombRaiderIII'' is about four times bigger on the inside. This might be intentional because it's, you know, alien.
* The dirigible in ''VideoGame/PrinceOfPersia3D'' is pretty damn big from the outside, but on the inside, it's one third of the game.
* At the end of ''VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld'', Bowser fights Mario in a small helicopter, which contains himself, the Princess, at least two Mushrooms, and as many massive bowling balls and Mechakoopas as needed. In this case, it's actually called the [[ClownCarBase Koopa Klown Kopter]], and has a clown-like face on it.
** Every inside area in ''VideoGame/SuperMario64''. You've got the Igloo in Snowman's Land, which is about 5 feet by 3 feet on the outside and holds a large room with multiple stories, enemies and coins on the inside; the volcano in LethalLavaLand, which is absolutely massive on the inside; and the Pyramid in Shifting Sand Land, again way larger on the inside of the building. Possibly also the Hotel Delfino in ''VideoGame/SuperMarioSunshine''.
* Since Banjo, an adult ''bear'', is established to be fairly tall, Many of the [=NPCs=] in ''VideoGame/BanjoKazooie'' and ''[[VideoGame/BanjoKazooie Banjo-Tooie]]'' can ''probably'' be assumed to have been scaled up for the sake of making interaction with them easier.

[[folder:ShootEmUp]]
* Most of the bosses in ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' are supposed to be roughly the same size as the player characters. In-game sprites generally have them about twice as tall. Then there's the matter of the backgrounds, which give us things like giant flowers or tombstones, and can make certain levels seem much larger than seems likely.

[[folder:SimulationGame]]
* ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing''. Most buildings, most notably, your character's house in its larger stages and the town museum, have interiors that wouldn't fit into the outside building.
* The ''[[VideoGame/StarTrekStarfleetCommand Starfleet Command]]'' games have a real problem with this. Often one can collide with planets, revealing that your ship with a crew of a few hundreds is roughly 1/4 the size of the planet Earth.
* Likewise the Starfleet Academy game mostly gets this right, and planets and stars are even somewhat reasonably sized. But a few problems remain, for example starbases aren't that much bigger than an Excelsior-class ship. Considering the ships are supposed to dock inside the top of the "mushroom", it'd never work.
* The ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon'' series. The degree to which this is so varies from game to game, with ''Magical Melody'' probably being the worst offender.
* In ''VideoGame/EscapeVelocity'', many large warships' sprites are only slightly larger than their destroyer and light capital brethren. Some of the larger ships appear to be bigger than most planets. The game's scale is a bit messed up.
** Also, the Polaris Striker and Dragon share the same in-universe length (50 meters) yet the sprite clearly shows the dragon being longer. (This is possibly a mistake by the developers.)
* In the various incarnations of ''VideoGame/SimCity'', each tile square is also supposed to be 1 acre. Yet a tile square is only big enough for a single one-family house with hardly any yard, and it takes 4 adjacent tile squares to build even a small apartment building. This could be hand-waved as just being a representation of an acre of homes, until you realize THE ROADS ARE AN ACRE WIDE (actually over 60 meters wide).
** Corrected in ''Sim City 4'', where the [=FAQs=] explicitly state that the length a tile is 16 meters. This means that small "cities" are roughly 1 square kilometer and the largest ones are 16 km^2. (Best to think of the individual "cities" as neighborhoods and the overall "region" as a metro area.) However, this introduces FridgeLogic in its own right when the player realizes that school buses won't travel more than about half of a kilometer from their respective school to pick up kids, which is usually the ''minimum'' distance that school bus service ''begins''.
* VideoGame/StrongholdKingdoms:
** Troops are massive compared to what they're supposed to be defending, with the keep only fitting five men and the buildings being just as cramped.
** Village buildings are porportioned oddly, with some being as tall as trees and other being smaller than the workers they're supposed to contain.
* ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'' presents a vast universe full of hundreds of planets, some of which probably only barely reach even a hundred metres across. The space stations are especially out of scale - a massive trade station might only have the same area as a large house, and the smaller stations would barely have enough internal volume for [[PlayerCharacter Trent]] to get out and stretch his legs.

[[folder:Pinball]]
* The playfield of ''Pinball/StarWarsDataEast'' has R2-D2 noticeably larger than the Death Star.
* Hankin's ''Pinball/TheEmpireStrikesBack'' depicts the Imperial [=AT-ATs=] as colossi bestriding the planet Hoth, towering over the horizon and capable of circumnavigating the planet with just a few dozen steps.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:TabletopGames]]
* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' has the infamous scaling issue with its human-sized miniatures. Space Marines are supposed to be 7 foot tall supermen clad in power armor (which the sheer bulk would make them almost 8 feet in height) whereas Guardsmen are average and, quite frequently, malnourished conscripts, putting them at a maximum height of around 6 feet. Miniature wise, both are identical in height. This applies to the vehicles too. If the Leman Russ was in correct scale with the Guardsmen, every time the turret fired it would bisect the tank commander standing in the hatch.
* Historical wargames are sometimes forced to invoke this for realistic gameplay. A unit of troops might, for instance, represent a brigade of French infantry from the Napoleonic wars. As such, the rules are geared to represent such a unit - that 2 inch square base with a dozen figures on is actually a large area of ground with a couple of thousand men. But that means a model farm to the same scale as the figures might accommodate the base quite comfortably, while in real life the soldiers would have had to be stacked on some form of multi-layer shelving to even try to fit in. Under-scale miniature scenery so that the 'footprint' of units and terrain is consistent is one way to deal with this.
* Inverted from the usual in ''TabletopGame/{{Monsterpocalypse}}''. Monsters tend to be on scale with each other, with most being around 60 meters tall. Buildings, on the other hand, are generally much smaller than they should be, with (going by monster height) a 120-meter empire state building, and a football stadium where the field barely manages 30 meters. Units are entirely out of scale with each other. The Mighty Joe Young-sized Frontline Ape is hoisting an armored car overhead, but the ecoterrorist Green Fury van has roughly the same mass as the ape. That's a big van.
* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' has an interesting version of this on the meta-level when it comes to creature "sizes". They are roughly blocked out as "tiny", "small", "medium", "large", "huge" and "gargantuan". Medium creatures take up a single 5-foot-by-5-foot "square", going downwards they are decreasing percentages of a square, and upwards takes 2, 3 and 4 squares. However, there's large variance for what counts in each size: for instance, a 4'6" Dwarf and a 7'8" Goliath are both said to take up a single square. Thus, fluff-wise and for those who use miniatures, different creatures are quite to scale, but mechanically one entity could be twice the size of another and be considered "the same".
* In ''Tabletopgame/BattleTech'', each hex on the playing field is 30 meters in diameter. The [[HumongousMecha battlemech]] miniatures - even without their stands - occupy a significant portion of each hex. While a Battlemech is huge, they are not ''60 meters tall'' huge; the AS7-D Atlas, one of the taller mechs, stands around 18 meters tall. The scale is even more wonky in city maps, where a Battlemech is almost as wide as an apartment building, though the ruleset that eschews hex-based movement for free-roaming units on custom, non-grid based maps can avoid the scale issue.
* TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}} has a tendency to make its AnimalsNotToScale, which would be fine if the flavor text didn't describe them as being of a relatively accurate size. This is most noticeable with dinosaurs, such as the Tyrannosaurus, which is listed as Gargantuan in size, despite being barely longer (and a bit lighter) than the Huge sized Triceratops. The Giganotosaurus, which has its size inflated to 60 feet in length (in reality it was around 45 feet long and much lighter), still isn't large enough to justify its size of Colossal, given that it is only half the weight (17 tons) of the Gargantuan Brachiosaurus (32 tons), and much shorter in height and length to boot.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:SportGames]]
* Most of Tecmo's ''Manga/CaptainTsubasa'' games use the same proportion to construct a player's body, leading to a few characters who are supposedly giants like Jito shrinking down to the same size as the rest of the team, except when he's in the Skylab Twin Shoot cut-in, [[YourSizeMayVary where he's suddenly bigger.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Toys]]
* The ''Franchise/{{Zoids}}'' anime has an interesting inversion. While the toyline clearly shows its scale with cockpits and pilot figurines, the Anime takes certain Zoids (notably the Ultrasaurus and Death Saurer) and makes them ''bigger'', often by a few orders of magnitude.
* Toys/RobotSpirits, Soul Of Chogokin and other toylines featuring HumongousMecha from multiple series usually have this problem by necessity due to the wildly varying sizes of different Super Robots. For example, while Anime/MazingerZ and Anime/{{Daitarn 3}}'s SOC toys are about the same size, in "real life", Mazinger is 18 meters tall while Daitarn is ''160''.
** Chogokin Classic Getter, Shin Getter, and the 2019 release of the Getter Emperor are most decidedly not to scale. Well, Classic and Shin are roughly well-proportioned in comparison to each other, but the Emperor at its smallest was roughly the size of Jupiter and only got larger over time, so its Chogokin figure's scale is much more extreme than the other Getters.
** The real winner, though, would have to be Revoltech's ''Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann'' action figures. Original GL is about the same size as Tengen Toppa GL. Anybody who is at all familiar with the series should see the problem here.
*** Let's face it. It's impossible to scale ''those'' mechs properly. Even if Original was the size of a flea, and TTGL was somehow the size of Jupiter, that wouldn't come close.
* Franchise/{{Transformers}} has this in multiple places (A more comprehensive exploration of this can be found at the [[http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Scale TFwiki's page on Scale]]):
** The toylines have several different "size" scales (Legends, Scouts, Deluxe, Voyagers, Leaders, Supremes, and so on). This can result in a Scout-class freight truck Transformer looking positively tiny next to a Voyager-class sports car (like Bumblebee). In particular, the Animated toyline has amusing size mismatches involving Prowl, in particular his Deluxe-class form wherein the motorcycle he transforms into is ''larger'' than Deluxe-sized Bumblebee's hatchback car!
** Combiner Scales: First, Combiners can be portrayed being of inconsistent size to their component robots (Menasor, who is made of sports cars and a truck, can nearly match Bruticus, who is made of military vehicles, in size; The exception is Superion, who ''would'' really be the size of a large building due to being made of several aircraft including a Concorde). Second, component robots in a combiner might be out-of-scale with each other (Landcross from the Victory toyline, who is made of a speedboat, a Space Shuttle, a jet fighter, two different classes of trucks, and a sports car). Third, Combiners are shown to be inconsistently large or small in portrayl (Constructicons who are smaller than Megatron combine to form a Devastator more than quadruple the Decepticon Commander's height).
** Transformer subclass scale: Micromasters and Minicons are sometimes portrayed with very inconsistent scale to regular Transformers (Some Minicons are shown to become human-scale hoverboards and motorcycles, yet their human-sized robot modes are the same size as Minicons that become small trucks, and ''both'' of them are portrayed as being smaller than Armada Optimus Prime ''or'' Armada Megatron's forearms!).
** ''Planet'' and ''City'' sized Transformers - Metroplex's massive toy is about the size of a large building or city block, but only in scale with Legends-class Transformers, and he is still out-of-scale with some of them. Unicron and Primus (as well as the guest-star Death Star/Darth Vader figure from the Star Wars Transformers crossover toyline, whose interior is completely out of scale with interior shots of the real Death Star in the films) are completely undersized compared to ''any'' transformer toy in production - the biggest indicator of this is that several named cities, like Iacon and Kaon, are actually modeled on Primus's body, as he turned himself into the planet Cybertron as part of his backstory, and any Transformer in scale with ''those'' cities as depicted would only be readily visible with a magnifying glass or microscope.
* Fans and collectors of Literature/AmericanGirl dolls would occasionally notice this in some of their toys, namely the [[http://www.americangirl.com/shop/julie-accessories/julies-car-wash-set-f0443 VW Beetle playset]] for Julie, and [[http://www.americangirl.com/shop/beforever-accessories/maryellen-jukebox-cmc59 Maryellen's jukebox]], the latter of which is a glorified external speaker for an iPod or a smartphone. It's somewhat justified as any bigger would be unwieldy to ship and thus even more [[CrackIsCheaper ridiculously expensive]], though fans still feel that it could've been better proportioned.
* ''Franchise/{{LEGO}}'' produces a number of licensed sets, the most famous of which is their Franchise/StarWars line. Small fighters like the X-wing or TIE Fighter are built roughly to the same scale to the pilot minifig as the movies, while larger ships are built to wildly different scales; the Millenium Falcon is slightly smaller than it should be, while the Star Destroyer and especially the [[MileLongShip Super Star Destroyer]] are built to ''much'' smaller scales. This is to maintain sanity, as a to-scale SSD would be the length of an Olympic swimming pool.
* The world of scale model building is one where issues of scale ''absolutely'' matter. Manufacturers are frequently called out on scale discrepancies within their kits and ranges by modellers who insist on something pretty close to perfection. It doesn't help that within the two principal modelling bands, there are anomolies which hang over from the days when different manufacturers had different ideas of what would be popular. 1:32 scale models are still there, for instance, even though the accepted standard in this range for practically all kit manufacturers and fans is 1:35. Classic kit manufacturer Airfix, in the smaller scale band, still produces a hodgepodge of kits and figures in HO/00 (approximate 1:87 scale, designed to go with model railway layouts), as well as slightly larger scales. The accepted industry yardstick here is less clearcut: it is tending now to 1:72, but many kits are still made in 1:76. Does it matter? well, yes. Take a model of the same subject in, say, 1:32 and stand it next to one in 1:35. There will be a visible scale difference. The same applies to 1:76 versus 1:72. And 1:87 is ''definitely'' smaller. Within each scale, however, there is generally consistency. [[note]]Talking to a clued-up modeller about, say, the Airfix model of the Crusader Tank and how its dimemsions are way out of scale even within itself, and you will get a far longer and more detailed answer than it might strictly need.[[/note]]. It's also interesting how, even in a well-scaled model, it's often bloody hard to get a pilot figure in an aircraft, or a driver/crew figure in a vehicle, to fit the given space convincingly - even though the crew space is to scale and a figure in the same scale should fit naturally!
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Wide Open Sandbox]]
* ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto'': Every now and then in the ''GTAIII'' era, you'll walk past a storefront with doors either too tiny or a little too big for the character scale. These storefronts are simply filler they didn't have time to scale properly.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Four X]]
* ''Stars!'' does a poor job of this during the combat playbacks. It suffers from the classic "Everything takes up one tile" problem whereby huge starbases and tiny scouts take up the same amount of space.
** In addition, there's no concept of limited ammo on ships fitted with torpedoes, so even the smallest scouts can fire indefinitely. It's assumed they're produced on-ship somehow.
[[/folder]]

* LampshadeHanging in ''Blood Omen: VideoGame/LegacyOfKain'', where the main character comments on the owner of a dungeon as practicing the darkest of magic because of the space distortion.

[[folder: Role Playing Games]]

[[folder: Real Time Strategy/Turn Based Strategy]]

* ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' contains an especially jarring version of this - any tiny hut can turn into a dungeon the size of the whole city district the original hut was in as soon as you step in, with no explanation. The game engine models each area as an independent world affected only by scripted module variables and the things inside the area itself, with doors serving as connections, meaning that depending on what you do with the door settings you can have a hovel lead anywhere from "generic hovel interior with a generic peasant in it" to "the FinalBoss's chambers" to "test area you only put in to look at some appearances and never got around to deleting". In the area tileset itself, a lot of buildings have generic interior tiles on the City Interior set and generic exterior tiles on the appropriate exterior set - but the "interior" ones tend to be about four times larger than the "exterior" structure. In the same game the red dragon Klauth, which the ''Forgotten Realms''' Players Handbook mentions to be of "Colossal" size dwarfing your character, looks considerably smaller and presumably it would not the only example among dragons.

* ''VideoGame/EmpireAtWar'' and its expansion are chock full of this. Walkers (such as the AT-ST and AT-PT) barely larger than your average infantryman, fighters being the size of an Imperial Star Destroyer's bridge tower, the Victory-class being only around the length of a canonically much smaller Acclamator for some reason, the list goes on. Many [[GameMod mods]] go out of their way to scale units much more accurately in all but the most extreme cases (like super star destroyers, which would take up the entire map if brought to their proper size). This one mostly comes down to the fact that, were they at their full scale, you would either have Star Destroyers filling up the screen or fighters being a swarm of indistinct dots. It even applies to planets, which utilize perspective to look larger than they are; go into the "Cinematic" camera and suddenly that perspective immediately evaporates and you have every planet being about the same size as Texas.

* ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' contains an especially jarring version of this - any tiny hut can turn into a dungeon the size of the whole city district the original hut was in as soon as you step in, with no explanation. The game engine models each area as an independent world affected only by scripted module variables and the things inside the area itself, with doors serving as connections, meaning that depending on what you do with the door settings you can have a hovel lead anywhere from "generic hovel interior with a generic peasant in it" to "the FinalBoss's chambers" to "test area you only put in to look at some appearances and never got around to deleting". In the area tileset itself, a lot of buildings have generic interior tiles on the City Interior set and generic exterior tiles on the appropriate exterior set - but the "interior" ones tend to be about four times larger than the "exterior" structure. In the same game the red dragon Klauth, which the ''Forgotten Realms''' Players Handbook mentions to be of "Colossal" size dwarfing your character, looks considerably smaller.

* ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'' contains an especially jarring version of this - any tiny hut can turn into a dungeon the size of the whole city district the original hut was in as soon as you step in, with no explanation. The game engine models each area as an independent world affected only by scripted module variables and the things inside the area itself, with doors serving as connections, meaning that depending on what you do with the door settings you can have a hovel lead anywhere from "generic hovel interior with a generic peasant in it" to "the FinalBoss's chambers" to "test area you only put in to look at some appearances and never got around to deleting". In the area tileset itself, a lot of buildings have generic interior tiles on the City Interior set and generic exterior tiles on the appropriate exterior set - but the "interior" ones tend to be about four times larger than the "exterior" structure.

* ''VideoGame/EmpireAtWar'' and its expansion are chock full of this. Walkers (such as the AT-ST and AT-PT) barely larger than your average infantryman, fighters being the size of an Imperial Star Destroyer's bridge tower, the Victory-class being only around the length of a canonically much smaller Acclamator for some reason, the list goes on. Many [[GameMod mods]] go out of their way to scale units much more accurately in all but the most extreme cases (like super star destroyers, which would take up the entire map if brought to their proper size).

* 1944 : Battle of the Bulge gave us pretty realistic take of unit measurement, with infantry being so tiny and tanks are obviously on scale. However due to the ShortRangeLongRangeWeapon and FogOfWar rules [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality being obeyed here]], having your [[ZergRush infantry team]], [[FragileSpeedster M3 Scout]], or even [[JackOfAllStats British Churcill]], suddenly confront a [[MightyGlacier Tiger Tank]] may induce OhCrap and shocked reactions.

* In ''VideoGame/DivineDivinity'', characters and buildings are out of scale with the map, with characters traveling from one end of a kingdom to other in a very short time. The sequel should avert this.

Lately, this trope is getting discredited in video games; better graphics have indeed made it possible to zoom in enough to see otherwise tiny soldiers in good detail, while maintaining the ability to zoom out and see large vehicles and most of the battlefield - with soldiers either very small, or (depending on the game) so tiny they're shown as symbols. However, it will probably remain a case of TropesAreNotBad, since it can be a hassle to have to constantly zoom in and out in order to command efficiently. In practice, even strategy games that downplay this trope at least use it to the extent that you can still micromanage a battle from a single zoom setting. Board games and Tabletop games are further constrained by the fact that you can only make physical game pieces so small before they become inconvenient to manipulate, or make the board so large before you can no longer play the game on a tabletop. Just imagine how impractical playing ''TabletopGame/{{Risk}}'' would be if the board representing the world map was gigantic enough to match the scale of the soldier pieces, or if each of those pieces didn't [[ActuallyFourMooks represent a whole army]]!

* The somewhat infamous ''Literature/LeftBehind: Eternal Forces'' RTS demonstrated why TropesAreNotBad in the first few levels, set in New York City where the units and buildings were largely to scale... which meant skyscrapers that jutted up and past the top-down camera, meaning there were only a few angles you could view the action from without buildings obscuring everything, [[TheProblemWithLicensedVideoGames among the game's other issues]].

* ''VideoGame/EmpireAtWar'' and the expansion, mostly. Infantry, Fighters, and Heroes are larger than what would seem realistic, but it's mostly excused. ''Home One'' is supposed to be the size of two ISD's, ''Arc Hammer'', being a factory ship, is correctly sized and armed, the difference between normal ISD's and the two hero ones (''Accuser'' and ''Admonitor'') is minimal, ''Executor'' is, well, the FREAKING ''EXECUTOR'', the ''Gargantuan'' is a weapons platform (although how it can fit inside a Gallofree Transport is beyond me...), ''Merciless'' is barely larger than normal ''Aggressor''-class destroyers, and both ''Hound's Tooth'' and ''IG-2000'' are, like the ''Millennium Falcon'' and ''Slave 1'', heavily-armed freighters, and are appropriately sized. The size differences between Red/Rogue Squadrons, Dark Squadron, Han, Chewie, Boba, Vader, Palpatine, Yoda, Luke, Tyber, Urai, Bossk, IG-88, Silri, Mara Jade, Kyle Katarn, ''Blizzard 1'', and ''Sundered Heart'' is negligible compared to other units (except Luke's X-Wing in Forces of Corruption, which is the size of a fookin' transport) With fighters and infantry, they're still small enough that each individual squad/squadron needs a to have a picture. Forces of Corruption also added land transport vehicles, which are actually large enough to realistically carry 9 squads of infantry. The only time scaling looks funny is if a dogfight is happening around a Star Destroyer and one switches to cinematic mode.
** This looks funny because the fighters and transports are HUGE. In the movies they are almost invisible if an entire capital ship is in shot, so there's a very good reason for this exception.

* 1944 : Battle of the Bulge gave us pretty realistic take of unit measurement, with infantry being so tiny and tanks are obviously on scale. However due to the ShortRangeLongRangeWeapon and FogOfWar rules [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality being obeyed here]], having your [[ZergRush infantry team]], [[FragileSpeedster M3 Scout]], or even [[JackOfAllStats British Churcill]], suddenly confront a [[MightyGlacier Tiger Tank]] may induce OhCrap and {{HSQ}} reactions.

* The ''Pokémon'' games, especially inside the Pokémon Gyms, which often contain several floors of seemingly complex puzzles. There's also the Pokémon Centers, buildings that are 1-story and 6 tiles big outside but are ''two'' floors of 50-60 tiles inside.

* Whether to play this straight or avert this in Videogame/{{HeartsOfIron}}III is a menu setting.