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These things in video games are 100% real. We promise.

  • The Masamune and Muramasa's status as Public Domain Artifacts and their frequent appearances in JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger may lead some gamers to assume that they are mythical swords, like Gram or Excalibur. In fact, they're real-life masterworks more akin to a Stradivarius instrument. Not only were Masamune and Muramasa historically real swordsmiths, there wasn't even "the" Masamune or Muramasa blade; several specimens of both still exist today in museums and private collections, and they occasionally appear at auction for the sufficiently lucky and/or wealthy collector to obtain. That said, "the" Masamune is often considered the suitably storied [and suitably lost] Honjo Masamune.
  • The S rank, present in many Japanese games that use ranking systems, is commonly assumed to be a way to inflate your rank past an A; however, it actually stems from the Japanese government's grading system, where S is the highest grade. A Japanese S is equivalent to an American A, a Japanese A is equivalent to an American B, and so on. Conversely, many Japanese games lack an F rank because E is the lowest grade in Japanese schools.
  • Ace Combat:
    • When the announcement trailer for Assault Horizon demonstrated an Apache attack helicopter rolling over on its side Star Fox style, a lot of armchair aviation experts cried foul. Too bad that is an actual thing Apaches can do, even if it's a bit embellished in Assault Horizon.
    • Lasers on aircraft for direct offensive purposes sounds completely science-fiction, especially considering the weird airplane it's mounted to that literally opens up to aim the laser in the games... but lasers were actually considered as a method for intercepting ICBMs. They were completely impractical for it for various reasons, which the series itself lampshades when the actual YAL-1 shows up for a mission in Ace Combat Infinity to shoot down a missile... and gets shot down itself before it can do anything.
    • The ADF-11F RAVEN from Skies Unknown can deploy small UAVs from its underbelly. It may seem like a ridiculous concept, but such craft actually do exist in real life, with the UTAP-22 being tested in the very year that Skies Unknown was released.
  • Alba: A Wildlife Adventure: While no app is as accurate as the one in the game, there are cell phone apps that focus on photographing animals and identifying them for scientific purposes. The best-known is probably iNaturalist.
  • Animal Crossing: The Juicy-Apple TV (or Apple TV prior to New Horizons), which is a literal TV shaped like an apple, may seem like a joke on the more well-known Apple TV. However, not only was this TV available in the games long before Apple produced theirs, but one Chinese company called Hannspree has been making apple-shaped TVs since the early 2000s. These novelty TVs were still being made as late as 2018, although it appears that production ceased as of 2021.
  • Battalion Wars: The Iron Legion "bazooka" fires a gob of molten metal instead of an anti-armor rocket. While usually used as a mine instead of a gun, this sort of weapon is called a "self-forging projectile."
  • At one point in Alpha Protocol, nutbar conspiracy theorist Steven Heck asks the protagonist, à propos of nothing, if he knew the CIA once wired a live cat with radio equipment back in the 60s. Operation Acoustic Kitty really happened.
  • Army of Two's mechanic of inserting a tampon into a bullet wound as emergency care received much derision from professional reviewers despite the developer's insistence that their consultant told them (and as some independent investigations have concluded) this is something some real armed combatants actually do. That was the whole reason tampons were invented in the first place before the feminine hygiene applications were realized.
  • Assassin's Creed:
  • BioShock:
    • The Big Daddy Bouncer is actually based on a real-life diving suit, specifically the French Carmagnolle. The Carmagnolle suit is also shown on the inner cover of Juno Reactor's The Golden Sun of the Great East album.
    • To Americans, at least, the idea of having to pay to access restroom stalls probably sounds like the kind of petty nickel-and-diming one could only expect in an ultracapitalist dystopia like Rapture. In fact, pay toilets were common in the US at this time, until a movement that started largely as a joke took off and convinced lawmakers across the country to ban them. They're still around in other parts of the world, including the UK, which explains their inclusion in RollerCoaster Tycoon as well. It's also the source of the British euphemism "spend a penny".
    • In the BioShock 2 DLC Minerva's Den, there is a super computer named The Thinker said to use ADAM to work. Many players wondered how the hell a substance that enables gene editing is used in a computer. DNA computing is a real thing, using the sequences of DNA to form binary sequences and then codes. Being able to edit genes on the fly, like ADAM enables, would really solve a lot of the drawbacks to the technology.
    • Based on BioShock Infinite's concept of multiple realities, it could be assumed that the "Boxer Rebellion" and "The Battle of Wounded Knee" were both made up to emphasize Comstock's murderous white supremacy. They were both actually very real and grim events of US history.
  • During her gag reel in BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, Makoto has her tail snapped off by Taokaka, which Kokonoe chalks up to Makoto having traits from the Kagutsuchi Island Squirrel. In reality, some species of squirrel actually can have their tails snap off as a one-time defense mechanism against predators.
  • Borderlands 2 features a lot of crazy weapon concepts: Belt-fed Gatling assault rifles, and rocket launchers, weapons that get more accurate with sustained fire, weapons that are thrown away instead of reloading them... Among these, Torgue guns shooting miniature missiles seem like another crazy invention of the development team, but no. Those are Gyrojets, and those did exist.
  • "Dr. Ryuta Kawashima" isn't a character Nintendo created for the Brain Age series, he's a Real Life Japanese scientist whose research inspired the creation of the games.
  • Given Bubsy 3Ds's infamous reputation and near-unplayability, many thought PSExtreme Magazine was a made-up magazine and/or that the lavish praise and "Gold X Award" on the game's cover is fake. It isn't.
  • Among the many issues fans take in regard to historical accuracy in Call of Duty: WWII is that there are a number of Soviet-made weapons being used by the Wehrmacht in both the multiplayer and single player modes. However, the Wehrmacht did field a number of Soviet weapons in their arsenal. Following the first successful months of Operation Barbarossa, the German military acquired so much Soviet material that they issued them to second-line troops. Among the most popular of these were the PPSh-41 submachine gun and the SVT-40 semi-automatic rifle; the latter was in such widespread use that the Germans issued field manuals for them. In addition, the period in which the campaign takes place is towards the end of the war, when the desperate Germans were issuing whatever they had in storage to front-line troops in the face of the Allied bombing campaign's destruction of their industrial infrastructure. The Germans also incorporated captured French, British, American, Czech, and Polish equipment, to the point that they developed their own classification system to keep all everything straight.
  • The famous translation from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets". This is a "Blind Idiot" Translation that happens to be funny, right? No, that's an excerpt from French novelist André Malraux's 1967 autobiography Antimémoires.
  • Many gamers thought that Colin McRae was a dour Scottish rally driver character made up by Codemasters to narrate for their Colin McRae Rally series of driving games.
  • Crimson Skies (The Diesel Punk Trope Codifier of Video Games) has Zeppelins that carry most of the planes and deploy and dock them mid-air using a trapeze hook. Seems unrealistic but it is a real technique for operating aircraft from zeppelins.◊ Want to shoot one down? Easy, right? Not in this game. This is surprisingly realistic, since many of the airships of the time were either helium-filled or using a hydrogen/helium double-cell system, and even pure-hydrogen rigid-frame zeppelins are surprisingly hard to ignite without incendiary/explosive rounds. Rockets, on the other hand...
  • The "Cadaver Synod" global event that pops up in Crusader Kings II whenever a Pope with the "Wicked Priest" dies, in which his successor digs up his corpse and puts him on trial for his crimes posthumously, is sometimes assumed to be yet another of Paradox's tongue-in-cheek gags by new players — but the inspiration is entirely historical.
  • While the chicken gun was intended as a humorous if not annoying Copy Protection failsafe built into Crysis Warhead that kicks in whenever authentication checks fail in a pirated copy, chicken guns do exist in Real Life, albeit with dead poultry used to simulate bird strikes on jet engines.
  • In Destroy All Humans 2, while in the Takoshima map (Japan's Fictional Counterpart), reading the mind of some of the male residents will reveal that they want to become geishas. They will then challenge the player to look up the fact that the first geishas were men.
  • Demon's Souls boasts a stealth throwing dagger that looks about as wild and impractical as the weapons you'd find in Bloodborne, so of course you'd assume it's something they made up. But as usual for this game, they didn't. The real-live version is called the mambele (among other names), and it comes in a wide variety of bizarre shapes.
  • The Division 2: The resident PMC faction fields a rather bizarre-looking Robot Dog that doesn't have a visible head and has the knees of each pair of legs pointing inward. This particular robot is based off a real one called BigDog, initially developed by DARPA before being contracted out to Boston Dynamics.
  • Some of the more memorable enemies of EarthBound (1994) are its animated enemy trees which explode when defeated. Not quite as far-fetched as one would think: Australia (no surprises there) is home to the eucalyptus tree genus, which are prone to exploding when exposed to fire. Admittedly, they don't look much like EarthBound's exploding trees (which the English translation refers to as oaks, anyway), and they certainly aren't animated or otherwise trying to kill you (at least, not intentionally trying to kill you). However, according to Wikipedia's "exploding trees" article, other kinds of trees can explode if the sap expands due to being frozen.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Mud Crabs are an aggressive, roughly tortoise-sized crab species found in many varieties throughout Tamriel. You'd be easily forgiven for thinking they're fictional, but you'd be wrong. (The Oblivion variety even looks somewhat like the real thing.)
    • Ebony is a series' staple of a high-tier Fantasy Metal, functioning somewhat like obsidian and theorized to be the petrified blood of the mortal world's "dead" creator god. Ebony does exist in real life; however, it is not a stone. It is actually a dense black wood taken from ebony trees found in India and parts of Africa. It's so dense it sinks in water, and is mainly used for ornamental stuff like chess pieces and piano keys (hence "Ebony and Ivory").
    • Wherever they appear in the series, Tamriel's native Sabre Cats have large, stocky, bear-like bodies as opposed to the sleeker, more slender appearance of modern real-life big cats. This understandably gives players the impression that Sabre Cats are are fantastic hybrid animals, like a griffon or a manticore. They are actually pretty much one-to-one copies of the genus Smilodon.
    • Skyrim:
  • You might think Pegnose Pete from Escape from Monkey Island is just a gag on peg-legged pirates, but prosthetic noses are a real thing, and have been for centuries; 16th century nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe wore a false nose after getting his cut off in a duel. The shape of the nose both helps draw air in to smell, and also helps keep the nasal passages from drying up by letting moisture collect on the inside of the nose. A prosthetic nose will do both of these, protect the exposed area from infection, and look more sightly.
  • One of F/A-18 Hornet's final missions, "Hole in One", has you destroy a nuclear shell-firing "supergun" built on the side of a mountain. One of these was actually partially constructed as part of Project Babylon.
  • Fallen London: In this game, there's a whole underhanded power struggle between various nations, between surface and the Neath, where diplomats, spies and agents of all sorts clash. Calling it "The Great Game" seems a little odd, perhaps a bit of dark humor considering who the pawns are in here, but there was an actual Great Game, and it included most of the involved nations.
  • Fallout:
    • The setting mirrors quite a number of ideas from the '50s and back, and believe it or not, the idea of selling beverages containing a healthy dose of radioactive elements is not just the game's invention. In fact, it's Older Than Television — the first such products appeared back in the 1890s! Although they had also disappeared by the mid 20th century, people having caught on to the dangers of radiation by then. The radioactive energy drink "Bonk!" in Team Fortress 2 is a similar, though exaggerated, reference to this.
    • Ditto for the nuclear cars, too. The idea was actually explored with the Ford Nucleon, but we've yet to make any nuclear reactors small enough.
    • The Fat Man portable nuclear catapult? It's a real thing. The M-29 Davy Crockett Weapons System, also known as the "Little Feller" project, used a mortar-style launch system rather than a mechanical catapult, but the mininuke projectiles look virtually identical down to the paintjob. The project was even canceled for a reason that most players quickly realize shortly after first using a Fat Man: Nuclear Weapons Taboo aside, it is a Very Bad Idea™ to be standing anywhere near the potential blast radius of a small nuclear missile with unfortunate accuracy issues and no "abort" option once fired. The device is a bit different thing than its in-game namesake, however, which was far larger.
    • The grenade machinegun sounds like the sort of over-the-top weapon that only an FPS could come up with. Except that there really are grenade launchers capable of fully-automatic fire. And yes, they are still insanely terrifying. The only unrealistic bit is a single person carrying and firing it without any sort of mounting or support, and even then they are designed in-universe to be used with strength-boosting Powered Armor (not that the penalty for having too-low Strength for it is all that severe).
    • Remember the Punch Gun, or its latest incarnation, the Ballistic Fist? There existed a real version of those gun-gloves, used mainly by spies as a concealed weapon. Not only that, but it functioned the same way — to fire the gun, you had to push down the plunger on the front by punching your target with it.
    • The company General Atomics International may sound like just part of the pre-War Fallout world's obsession with nuclear power. General Atomics Technologies Corporation is a real and still extant company. They even have robots (specifically, UAVs) as one of their major product-lines. The game's counterpart is overall closer to General Electric, though, with its focus on consumer products.
    • Raven Rock is a real underground military command center. You could be forgiven for thinking it was a Morrowind reference. In fact, the location in Morrowind was named after the real-life complex in Maryland, not too far geographically from the physical location of Bethesda Game Studios.
    • The abandoned fairground in Point Lookout has a number of White Star pinball machines, which was the real-life name of an arcade system board used by Sega Pinball and Stern Pinball from 1995 to 2005.
    • Some of the ways mutation and exposure to nuclear fallout affect things in the games aren't too far off from what would happen in reality. As outlandish as Brahmin seem, two headed cattle happen from time to time, even without nuclear fallout involved. The Yao Guai in 3 (not the giant ones in New Vegas) are basically just black bears that lost most of their hair. The idea of mutated animals like this forming new species isn't outlandish, either: nuclear testing in the Pacific did the same thing with sharks.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • The Goodsprings General Store, Pioneer (Prospector) Saloon, and Jean Sky Diving school are all real businesses, although the last is in ruins in the game. The real-life Goodsprings happily acknowledges New Vegas brought it a small amount of fame as well, with the general store (now called "Ghost Town Cafe") keeping a section with memorabilia.
      • Most of the towns and settlements in the game are real. New Vegas is obvious, and Primm and Boulder City slightly less so, but Goodsprings, Nipton, Sloan, and Nelson are all real towns near the California–Nevada border (though all are very sparsely populated today, with Nipton being the most populous with around 60 inhabitants).
      • Incidentally, many people seem to think Boulder City is supposed to be (or is based on) Boulder, Colorado, but there is a Boulder City in Nevada, and is the second most populated location depicted in the game after Las Vegas itself.
      • The Legion's Lottery of Doom in Nipton, believe it or not, is also based on reality. Not the "of doom" part — Nipton was where Nevada residents went to buy tickets for the California state lottery, as Nevada's constitution forbids a state lottery. Incidentally, Nipton lost this appeal when a store just on the California side of the border near Primm was opened. And yes, Nipton's in California despite being southeast of Goodsprings and Primm.
      • NCR Correctional Facility's real-life counterpart is the now-defunct Southern Nevada Correctional Center.
      • The real-world Whiskey Pete's Casino in Primm houses the exhibit of Bonnie & Clyde's death car, who were the basis for the Fallout 'verse's Vikki & Vance and the casino of that name.
      • As the above sentence implies, Primm is a real town — its other notable in-game feature, the Bison Steve Hotel (with its rollercoaster the Diablo) is based on the real Primm's Buffalo Bill's Hotel (with its rollercoaster the Desperado).
      • The HELIOS One power plant is present in the real world as Nevada Solar One.
      • Although the town itself is completely fictionalnote , Dinky the T-Rex in Novac is modeled after the Mr. Rex sculpture in Cabazon, California, and named after the neighboring Dinny Apatosaurus sculpture.
      • One quest has you raise a sunken B-29 that crashed into Lake Mead in 1948, which was a real event, and the real plane is still down there.
      • REPCONN is an expy of the real rocket fuel production company PEPCON, whose Henderson, NV plant was destroyed by a fire and explosion in 1988.
      • There is also an actual Old Mormon Fort in Vegas.
      • Sarsaparilla really does have a history of health scares and sensationalist reporting- the sarsaparilla plant was mixed with Sassafras in many traditional root beer recipes... until it was discovered that a major component of sassafras oil, Safrole, is both carcinogenic and has multiple adverse metabolic effects. While sarsaparilla itself is fine, the link has lead to periodically resurfacing urban legends misblaming sarsaparilla as the toxic component thanks to confusion between "sarsaparilla the alternate name for root beer" and "sarsaparilla the plant".
      • You can't, however, see the Strat (the inspiration for the Lucky 38) from Primm in real life. And the Strat doesn't dominate the Vegas skyline in general the way it does in the game. Granted, this is because other major landmarks like the MGM Grand or Caesars Palace haven't been blown up in reality.
      • There are several real-life vintage hamburger stands named Dot's Diner. The one in Bisbee, AZ most resembles the chain in the Fallout verse.
      • A radio broadcast mentions that Legate Lanius has instituted a form of punishment for "underperforming" units where after executing the officers, he orders that nine-tenths of the unit beat the remaining tenth to death. This may sound like a typical example of post-apocalyptic brutality, but this was a real practice in the Roman army, from which modern English speakers get the word "decimation", with the unfortunate tenth determined by drawing lots.
    • Fallout 4:
      • Far Harbor from the expansion of the same name is based on a real town, Bar Harbor, on Maine's Mt. Desert Island, and Acadia, the synth settlement, is the real-life name of the national park there.
      • The Jamaica Plain settlement is located in and named after a real neighborhood of the southeast Boston area.
      • Although the Sanctuary Hills neighborhood doesn't exist in real life, the Old North Bridge leading to it does, as part of Minuteman National Historical Park. (If you're paying attention, the conceit appears to be that Vault-Tec was powerful enough to purchase the northern part of the Park for development into a residential district that would serve as the staging ground for those VT wanted for Vault 111's cryogenic program, as well as 111 itself. The whole thing speaks to how powerful Vault-Tec was becoming.)
      • Sanctuary Hills. One might think that the houses in this neighborhood are merely a result of the developer's imagination. However, they're actually a very accurate reproduction of Lustron Homes — a style of house that was assembled, rather than built, from 1948 to 1950. The largest remaining collection of such homes exist on the U.S. Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, and thanks to their porcelain-coated steel plating, look very much like they did when they were first built.
      • The quest "Trouble Brewin'" has you recover a beer-brewing robot named Drinking Buddy. Two years before the game's release, a team of North Irish beer craftsmen, with the aid of Kickstarter, developed a real automatic brewing machine, appropriately named Brewbot.
      • The Boston Mayoral Shelter is a thing in real life, except it's called the Massachusetts State Emergency Operations Center, and, instead of being a private fallout bunker for Boston's mayor, is a command-and-control facility to be used by state emergency services in the case of a major disaster (and as such, doesn't have the luxuries depicted in the game and is instead stuffed full of communications equipment).
      • The board game Blast Radius contains nuclear material. It's not a parody of 1950s nuclear paranoia - it's inspired by the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a thankfully unsuccessful real world toy.
  • Fate Franchise:
    • Kiara Sesshouin from Fate/EXTRA CCC and Fate/Grand Order is a Buddhist nun whose entire schtick is that she was taught to embrace carnal desire and wishes to push her Buddhist sect's philosophy upon the entire world. Sounds ridiculous since a major part of Buddhism is about abstaining desire, right? The Buddhist school of thought that preaches sex as one way of becoming closer to Buddha, the Tachikawa school, is real and was formed in the twelfth century as an offshoot of Shingon Buddhism (though it is widely considered heretical by most Buddhists).
    • The name of the heroine from Fate/Grand Order, "Mash Kyrielight", is easy to dismiss as one of the many As Long as It Sounds Foreign names in the franchise. However, "Mash" is actually a real name, albeit a masculine one.
    • FGO is rather infamous for the idea of turning Classical Mythology into a First Church of Mecha, giving Greek myth a sci-fi spin that ancient legends obviously did not have. So when Queen Europa of Crete shows up accompanied by an autonomous Humongous Mecha named Talos, it's easy to just chalk it up to that... but this one is actually a real thing. Yep, greek myth did in fact include a giant robot.
  • Final Fantasy VIII:
    • The main character, Squall, wields what's called a "Gunblade", a Mix-and-Match Weapon of a pistol and a sword. Most assumed there was no way on earth something like that could have existed. It did, actually. Of course, it wasn't exactly a practical weapon.
    • That being said, Squall's weapon is explicitly a triggered Vibro Weapon...which also exists, but with the much more mundane utility of electric carving knives.
  • Final Fantasy XV: The Mystery Meat Sushi is actually Spam musubi. For a lot of people (Especially in Europe), this was actually their introduction to it as Musubi wasn't really common outside of Hawai'i, Las Vegas (known as the "Ninth Island") and the Philippines.
  • Fire Emblem:
  • The premise of Five Nights at Freddy's 3 is that, 30 years after the first game, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria has been reopened as a horror attraction in response to in-universe Urban Legends. While a few people found it strange, many locations with gruesome or unpleasant histories do tend to gather tourists in the real world (examples include the house where Lizzie Borden killed her parents, locations where Jack the Ripper is said to have killed people, submarine trips to the Titanic, and countless others). Some people just have weird tastes.
  • Most, if not all, of the locations in Forza Horizon 3 can actually be found in Australia. This includes cities such as Surfers Paradise and Byron Bay as well as landmarks such as Maroondah Dam and the Twelve Apostles.
  • In Fuga: Melodies of Steel, the characters sometimes trigger a hidden event called the "secret garden" where one of the kids need to, um, unload on a duck-shaped potty. Some people think the potty was something crafted specifically for the game. Nope, it's real, and apparently duck-shaped potties are very common across Japan.
  • At the start of The 11th Hour, Carl Denning is shipped a small, laptop-like handheld device called the GameBook, which he has no idea how to use. The prop he uses in the live action cutscenes is actually a Palmtop PC, similar to the Atari Portfolio, which were somewhat common in the 90s when the game was released, and were the predecessors to cell phones and PDAs. Doesn't quite explain how Henry Stauf and Samantha Ford can remotely communicate with Carl through it, though.
  • Some reviewers accused Ghost of Tsushima of engaging in Politically Correct History for featuring female soldiers and same-sex relationships as something perfectly accepted in Feudal Japan. In reality, both are pretty in line with reality. While some courtiers were dismissive of the practice, it was quite common for Samurai clans to train their women in combat (somebody had to defend the homestead while soldiers were away), and some went as far as to bring them to combat as support archers, just like the ones featured in the game. Meanwhile, homosexuality really was fairly accepted in the time period the game takes place in (only for men; for women it was potentially scandalous), to the point that Shintoism has multiple deities devoted to gay love and sex.
    • The multiple rocket launchers the Mongols wield can seem pretty outrageous and anachronistic to an untrained eye, but the Mongols really did use rocket weapons just like that in combat, and they worked exactly the way the game portrays. The only thing Sucker Punch got wrong was using an incorrect model (the launchers in the game look more like the later created hwacha).
  • Going Under: When interrupting Caffiend's meeting during the tutorial, he'll mention that Joblin toilets are now slanted to increase productivity, and exploring Joblin on revisits may reveal the aforementioned slanted toilet seat. While it's not to the ridiculous 45 degree angle shown in-game, slanted toilet seats◊ designed to discourage extended restroom use exist. Use of them, however, is illegal anywhere that has disability protections in place.
  • The Grand Theft Auto series has a Running Gag of making Fun with Acronyms expies of real life police forces, such as N.O.O.S.E, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that C.R.A.S.H. is another silly Rockstar joke. Not only was it a very real former gang-crime task force of the LAPD, but San Andreas' Big Bad, Officer Tenpenny and the leader of C.R.A.S.H. in the game, is an Expy of Rafael Antonio Pérez, one of the real-life C.R.A.S.H.'s most notorious members. Amusingly, if anything, the GTA version of C.R.A.S.H. is less corrupt and over-the-top than the real organization was; the investigation of the real group showed proof of more than 70 corrupt officers, whereas the fictional C.R.A.S.H. is limited to two corrupt officers and one less-than-willing accomplice.
  • Many games have insectoid enemies named antlion, which is a real insect.note 
    • The antlions from Half-Life 2 like to hide under sand, like the real ones, although they look more like monstrous locusts.
    • Golden Sun has giant antlion pits in the Lamakan Desert, where they can trap the player characters into a battle. They are visually accurate to real antlions: large, flat grubs with giant pincer jaws. A Palette Swap version shows up in Random Encounters in the Suhalla Desert, and in the sequels.
    • The antlions depicted in SimAnt, however, were shown perfectly accurately.
    • In Pokémon, the Trapinch line introduced in Generation III is based on them. Many a Pokemon fan complained about Trapinch's seemingly random evolution from a small, orange, big-headed bug into a green dragonfly-like creature, not realizing that it's based on the actual life cycle of the antlion.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess allows Link to catch adult antlions, although these are a little strange, as they glow in the dark.
    • The antlions in Phantasy Star I look more like giant spiders (being a Palette Swap of a tarantul) but they dig sand pit traps much like real antlion larvae.
    • The antlions in Happy Wars look pretty close to real antlion larvae, and also dig sand pit traps.
    • Terraria has giant antlions as one of the most common enemies in the desert, and unusually depicts all stages of their life cycle, from the burrowing larvae to the winged adults.
  • Halo:
    • The majority of fans don't realise that "Master Chief" (or, more formally, Master Chief Petty Officer) is an actual rank in the US Navy. This has been exacerbated from the rank's use in fiction being heavily subject to the One-Mario Limit, and other Master Chiefs in fiction tend to have their rank glossed over and/or only referred to by the "MCPO" abbreviation. In the game lore itself, expanded material mentions that many UNSC personnel who reach the rank of "Master Chief" prefer to informally go by "Top Chief" instead, as a gesture of respect towards the series protagonist who by that point has become The Paragon of the UNSC and humanity as a whole.
    • Many of the UNSC weapons in the series are based on real life weapons, such as the shotgun with its strange, top-loading feature being based on the South African Neostead 2000. The development team actually had to cut some of the odder features of the real guns, like the Neostead working by pumping forward instead of backwards and having two magazine tubes (something which only became relatively commonplace in real life after Halo: Reach's launch almost a decade later), or the SMG's original reloading animation, which would have included pushing a 'stick' of caseless ammunition into the feed port, then breaking it off to avert One Bullet Clips. For extra fun, the Assault Rifle of the first game was designed as a concept of what a futuristic bullpup assault rifle would look like, but between nailing down the design and releasing the game, the F2000 was released, and ended up heavily featured in another popular Xbox game just a year later.
  • Putting aside that the game is set in a world where the laws of physics are very different, critics deride Hammerfight for breaking Willing Suspension of Disbelief with the premise of flying machines fighting by swinging maces at each other. Thing is, helicopters have actually been used to swing wrecking balls.
  • Some western players of Harvest Moon: Back to Nature and its remakes assumed that the Spa-Boiled Egg, which is obtained by throwing an egg into the hot spring, was made up for the game. In actuality it's a real Japanese dish called Onsen Tamago.
  • Hunt: Showdown features a lot of weaponry that feels anachronistic, like chain-fed revolvers, but which actually did exist in the 19th century (some only in prototype form) and they're usually real models too. The few that aren't actual guns are very closely modeled on real ones.
  • In I=MGCM, the Ohtori twins (2 out of 12 playable magical heroines) Ao and Aka being twins born at the same time yet having different fathers seems impossible. However, the phenomenon, known as "Heteropaternal Superfecundation", is a documented occurrence, although an extremely rare one.
  • Kingdom Hearts has Sea Salt Ice Cream, which is a favorite of many a character from the second game on. It sounds too weird to exist and if it did, the salt would lower the freezing point of the mixture, making it difficult to maintain a solid form in the real world. Not only does this stuff exist, it's sold in Tokyo Disneyland, where the creator of Kingdom Hearts tried it and loved it so much he put in the second numbered game.
  • In Kingdom of Loathing, one can mine for asbestos ore (a fibrous material used in fireproofing, until it was discovered that tiny particles of it tended to get everywhere and foul up people's lungs). There's a whole family of different minerals called "asbestos", you do mine for them, and some of them are chunky. Although the Kingdom of Loathing version was created when prehistoric fire-breathing dragons died and then were buried in landslides and such, undergoing a process similar to the creation of crude petroleum, which is probably not how the real thing forms.
  • The Last of Us: The fact that people turn into zombies after inhaling the spores of a fungus is just the developers' way of spicing up the zombie formula, right? Well, no, there's actually a family of fungi called Cordycipitaceae that takes over the ants' nervous system and makes it climb into a spot with optimal humidity and temperature for the cordyceps to grow. Real cordyceps, of course, is harmless to humans (and is even used in some medicines).
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The ocarina, featured in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, was a real musical instrument, present in many world cultures, sometimes for millennia. The model as seen in the game was developed in the mid-19th century. Not only is the ocarina a real instrument, there was a real version of the ocarina from the game made and sold. It looks exactly like the one in the game and is playable. Unfortunately, you can't toggle night/day with it, nor can you use it to teleport yourself.
    • The rupee is a real currency, used in places like India and Pakistan. Although real rupees are represented by coins and bills like most other modern forms of currency, not colorful gems.
    • Though the milk bars found in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds may sound like they're just child friendly versions of a real bar, milk bars do exist in real life. Unlike the milk bars found in games, the real milk bars served other drinks besides milk based ones and they don't serve alcoholic milk (which is what the Chateau Romani implies). Relatedly, alcoholic milk actually exists, too.
    • At first glance, the large-beaked Loftwings from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword might appear to look that way because of the stylized cartoonish aesthetic of the game. They actually look almost exactly like the real life Shoebill.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
      • "Blood moon" is an actual colloquial name for a lunar eclipse (generally a total lunar eclipse), because the Moon can appear to be dark red when this happens. Some fans consider the name of the phenomenon in BotW to be overly dramatic, unaware of this fact.
      • The ridiculous-looking Durian fruit may seem made-up to anyone who doesn't live in southeast Asia, but it's one of the most realistic items in the game. Despite its enormous size, it grows on trees, and its strong smell and "king of fruits" nickname from the ingame description come directly from the real version. Durians are regularly seen in other Japanese games, with Super Mario Sunshine and Animal Crossing: New Leaf being examples.
      • The Lizal Tri-Boomerang is a patently ridiculous-looking weapon, with a three-pronged blade that sticks out at wild angles. It's actually based on a real weapon, some of which have the same configuration of blades. They're even designed to be thrown, but unlike the Lizal Tri-Boomerang, they don't return when thrown.
      • The bizarre mushroom-looking trees growing throughout much of the Ridgelands are real trees.
  • The Copy Protection of Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work (the Aerodork pamphlet) includes many destinations that sound fake, being overtly sexual (Intercourse, PA; Spread Eagle, WI; Loveladies, NJ; etc.). All of these towns/cities are real.
  • There actually existed a Morello crime family, though unlike its fictional counterpart in Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, it operated primarily in New York as opposed to the Chicago-inspired Lost Heaven in the game. Both families went defunct in the 1930s though.
  • When Medal of Honor: Warfighter came out, many people made fun of the subtitle, not realizing that Warfighter is a real life military term. Although that real term also has a level of derision as many feel it is overly motto Narm or another invention of the military industrial complex designed to part the Government from its money.
  • In Mega Man 8, Duo, one of the main characters of the game, fights an evil robot in the intro cutscene who some fans have nicknamed "Oud". While this is more than likely meant to be Duo's name backwards, an oud is in fact a real life string instrument that originated in the Middle East, fitting with the music themed names of many characters in the series.
  • Metal Gear:
    • The Metal Gear series is what the world would be like if the fringe military research projects actually worked. Mind control, psychic soldiers, weaponized animals, robot assassins, space lasers, and most of the rest of it have all been given serious research dollars at one time or another.
    • Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake had singing sand imported from Nariko, Japan. Singing sand exists, as it can be found all over the world, and it does make a squeaking noise when stepped on. However, there is no specific type of singing sand from Nariko.
    • Metal Gear Solid:
      • This may have been the case in terms of the weaponry, since they sounded and looked exotic enough to a lot of gamers first exposed to them. Every weapon is real, except the Nikita (though the concept is in missiles such as the TOW - the only outright impossibility is how slow the missile moves without dropping into the ground) and personal chaff grenades (chaff is usually an aircraft thing). Since then, these weapons introduced in the series have become staples of video game arsenals, in some cases moreso than in reality (the SOCOM pistol and FAMAS rifle having since dropped by the wayside due to issues with weight, performance, and/or budget).
      • The Ear Pull event that Vulcan Raven mentions is a very much real event designed to test endurance, although some Arctic Sports communities have banned it due to the squeamishness of their audience and the inherent danger it poses to the competitors (bleeding, stitches and the like). The Stick Pull and Four Man Carry events mentioned in The Twin Snakes are also real events in the Eskimo-Indian Olympics. Even the Muktuk Eating Contest mentioned in the PSX version is a real event, meaning Snake wasn't just being snarky about Raven's size.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater:
      • There's a part where Sigint tells Snake the story of a unit of Russian "bomb dogs" during World War II, who were to be used to destroy tanks (and failed because the Russian tanks had been used for the training, causing the dogs to attack them instead of the German Panzers). Since he describes it as a secret military project, it's safe to assume it's just the usual Hideo Kojima insanity and just another detail in a game about psychic bee soldiers and electric megalomaniac Communists. It isn't. The bomb dogs were real and the plan ended up exactly how Sigint describes, at least according to the most common version of the story.note 
      • Additionally, the flying platforms seen in Metal Gear Solid 3 were real things. Oh, and the drone used by Naked Snake at the beginning of Operation Snake Eater, and the WIG? Both real.
      • And the Shagohod. One look at the Shagohod and you might think Kojima was going overboard with the mechanical designs. Thing is, however, there really were tanks designed to fire nuclear artillery. They don't actually function like the Shagohod does.
      • Also, the Shagohod's Archimedes' Screw propulsion system? Some early snowmobiles used similar systems, and the Soviets built the ZIL-29061. It works best on snowy, icy, or muddy terrain.
      • Those tanks that Snake briefly saw at Groznyj Grad, which Volgin later destroys while rampaging across Groznyj Grad? Those were actually real, and Sigint's description when calling them is also their real history (although there were more factors to their cancellation besides simply a lack of funds).
      • Even the Philosophers' treasures are Ripped from the Headlines: they are treasures Chiang Kai-shek took from Nanjing and stored in the U.S, though later lost to non-Patriot related lawsuits.
      • A lot of people think CalorieMates are a fictional product but you can actually buy them in Japan. In fact, the only fictional products in the entire series are probably the cigarettes (when they aren't Lucky Strikes).
      • For those who are skeptical enough to believe that the Markhor is a fictional animal (considering Metal Gear Solid 3 has added fictional animals like the Baltic Hornets), they will be surprised to know that the markhor does exist and that its name really does mean "snake eater."
      • While Baltic Hornets certainly don't exist, the Japanese Giant Hornet certainly does. Their name in Japanese is ōsuzumebachi which translates to "giant sparrow bee", and they are a major threat to honey bee hives. The hornets will sniff out honey bees, and pillage their nests, literally butchering entire colonies of bees before hauling all the honey and delicious bee-torso steaks they can stuff into their home nest. It seems the bee/hornet confusion may be more a result of Lost in Translation than Artistic License – Biology.
      • The code phrase Zero gives Snake is "Who are the Patriots?" to be responded to with "La-li-lu-le-lo". This sounds like a nonsensical reference to the previous game, but (as Kojima notes in the director's commentary) it is based on two real shibboleths used historically by Japan in wars - "ga-gi-gu-ge-go" and "ba-bi-bu-be-bo". (Both of these are sounds that are hard for Koreans or Chinese to say without sounding like they have a distinct Korean or Chinese accent. "La-li-lu-le-lo" is a sort of fanciful Japanese imagining of what might prove to an American that someone is a native English speaker.)
    • A lot of people playing Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain will think the Fulton air recovery system is the most ridiculous thing ever and there would be no way it could exist in real life. Believe it or not, it is real.
      • It must be noted, though, that it does not work the way it is depicted in the games (with the balloon rapidly whipping the load into the sky through its own buoyancy). The balloon only carries one end of a long cable to a high enough altitude that an aircraft equipped with special arms on its nose can engage it safely. Afterwards the load is winched in.
    • In a world of artificially intelligent robots, Huey's electronic cigarette may look like this. What's interesting, however, is that there was a patent for such product in the right timeframe - however, they were not developed until early 2000.
    • The Cypher surveillance drone from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty exists in real life, albeit only in prototype form. The game also has a fictional Attack Drone variation.
    • Similar to the Borat example under Film, many players of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance likely thought Abkhazia was just a made-up area with a surprising amount of backstory written for Codec conversations. It's a real place, and all of the history Boris tells you of it is true.
    • The parasites in Metal Gear Solid V have many impossible qualities, but some of their traits are based on real life parasites: infected characters have notable alterations to their lungs, muscles, nervous system, skin, and eyes— all areas where Toxoplasmosis symptoms occur. And there is a real-life parasitic fungus that grows into the brain of infected ants and causes them to climb to high places in order to spread spores further. Additionally, Wolbachia really changes its host's sex from male to female.
  • Japanese city-building game Metropolismania featured several real-world store chains, such as U.N.I.Q.L.O., which were little-known outside Japan.
  • Mirror's Edge:
  • Minecraft has Silverfish. While they aren't aggressive, spiky, or live in the walls of old dungeon ruins, silverfish are indeed a real insect.
  • The shopping center in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's "Wolverines" mission, despite it taking place in Virginia, is based on a real life one in Vancouver, WA, as seen here.
  • The original Monster Truck Madness allows you and your opponents to drive monster trucks on water. As ridiculous and unrealistic as it might sound—not helped by Large-Ham Announcer "Army" Armstrong—a modified Bigfoot monster truck actually drove on water in real life.
  • Even the most die-hard Mortal Kombat fans may be surprised to hear that the Lin Kuei was (and is) a real organisation. However, they had very little to do with the ones in the games (they were not actually ninjas—they were more like a secret monastic order of Crazy Survivalists), although there is a mostly-discredited theory that they inspired the Japanese ninja, as in the games.
  • Namco Museum Volume 4 for the original PlayStation contained an arcade game called Genpei Toumaden, which up until then had not been released in North America. Retitled The Genji and the Heike Clans, the game features a "character" called "Taira no Kagekiyo". A number of American game players may or may not know that he isn't a character created by Namco for the game. Kagekiyo was a true historical person. A member of the "Taira" ("Heike") clan, he fought during Japan's "Genpei" Wars where he died in battle. In the game, he comes back to life and seeks revenge on the Genji clan.
  • Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-: Kannon Bosatsu/Guanyin is widely regarded as female, so his portrayal as a man in this game looks like a Gender Flip to the casual observer, but he is in fact male in Indian Buddhist mythology.
  • Most of the Nancy Drew games are about solving riddles a dead person left to help find a treasure they hid. Believe it or not, people have hidden treasures and written cryptic riddles as to how to find it. [1]
  • Certain Need for Speed games show the local PD employing some six-digit exotics to chase down lawbreakers that most taxpayers would probably vote against in real life. However, some law enforcement agencies (particularly in Europe) really do have some very nice wheels, such as a Lamborghini Gallardo and subsequently Huracan that currently serves in an Italian police force interception squad, (In this case, the car was a gift from Lamborghini, sidestepping the tax dollars issue) not to mention that the Lamborghini squad cars do have a practical use in the form of emergency organ transport, as it is prudent for said donor organs to be delivered swiftly to a person in dire need of one. Some British police forces have adopted the Subaru Impreza WRX or Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, popular cars in the Real Life tuner and rally racing scene, for motorway policing duties on the grounds that it takes one to catch one.
    • It's even more so in Dubai, where they deployed an elite fleet of supercar police units. And one of them is a Bugatti Veyron of all vehicles.
    • Normally one won't encounter such vehicles unless their "Wanted" level is really high. And true to life, police officers won't bring out the souped up cars unless their normal Crown Victorias can't keep up with the perp. Also such vehicles are normally employed by the higher level law enforcement, like state highway patrol officers or county sheriffs.
    • Euro Truck Simulator 2 also features the Italian police Lamborghini. Since the game's police issue traffic fines on sight with no need for a chase, it has little gameplay difference compared to the common police cars.
  • The New Order Last Days Of Europe:
    • Many of the Nazis' odder projects seem a little too outlandish to be attempted. Damming the Mediterranean? Sectioning off an entire chunk of France and Belgium and giving it to the SS? A freaking solar-powered Kill Sat? Sounds like something out of a B-tier pulp novel. And yet these were all on the Reich's drawing boards in reality. They, of course, stayed there due to their sheer insanity, but in the mod, fueled by victory and hubris, they try it all out to the expected disastrous effect; the Atlantropa project not only ruins dozens of port cities but threatens to collapse at every turn (to the point the Iberians will split off to seize it before the Nazis can neglect it any further), the Sun Gun can be built only to fail to set anyone on fire, fall out of orbit and maybe crush Oskar Dirlewanger, and the Ordenstaat Burgund is an authoritarian hellhole that the Third Reich despises and even Big Brother would violently balk at.
    • Valery Yemelyanov, AKA Zigfrid Schultz, AKA Velimir. Batshit insane even by the standards of the setting, he is convinced the Slavs are the Master Race, descended from the mythical Hyperboreans, who are aliens, that the original lands they came from (including Palestine areas) have been taken over by Jews and should be reclaimed, and incidentally that the Nazis are actually controlled by Jews as well. If this all sounds too far-fetched and ridiculous to believe, it'll be surprising to know that in reality his beliefs were more or less the exact same in the OTL. Here he just has a platform to "recreate" Hyperborea with as a brutal, warmongering Pagan theocracy, whereas his most notable "achievement" back in real life was murdering his wife with an axe.
  • When Square Enix announced NieR's sequel to be named NieR: Automata, some people apparently didn't realize that "automata" is an existing word, not another Word Purée Title. It's the plural of "automaton".
  • William Adams, the player character of Nioh, is based on a sailor for the Dutch East Indies Company who actually became a samurainote , though as only as an advisor to Tokugawa Ieyasu rather than as a demon slayer. He was also English, not Irish. Further, he was actually the sixth foreigner to become a samurai, the first being an Africannote  man named Yasuke, who was a retainer to Oda Nobunaga. You meet him late in the game as a boss.
  • The bar "plastic model" shown in No More Heroes really exists. It's the favorite place of Suda51.
  • The hexagon-shaped storm on Saturn that is important to the plot of Observation is an actual thing on Saturn.
  • PAYDAY 2: ECM Jammers are, in fact, a real thing. For pretty obvious reasons, they're banned almost worldwide as they intercept nearby phone and radio signals and mix up the frequency into an incoherent mess nobody on either end of a call can decipher.
  • The Rocketbelt featured in Pilotwings actually exists, although impractical, since it burns through its fuel in 30 seconds. A similar vehicle, the Martin Jetpack, is under development and has quite a bit more air time.
  • Pokémon
    • Before Wikipedia or the Internet, it was difficult to explain that many Pokémon were inspired by mythological animals (for example, Magikarp's evolution into Gyarados is based on the legend of the "Dragon's Gate", a waterfall that will turn any carp that swims all the way up into a dragon).
    • The Moon Stone and Sun Stone are actual semiprecious stones. They might not have the same powers, or form a set of elemental stones.
    • A lot of Pokémon are also based on real-life animals that are better known in Japan than in other parts of the world. Manaphy and Phione are based on sea angels, for example.
    • Although the regions might seem like a fictional world, several mentioned places like Tunguska in Russia are recognised as real places.
    • All of the regions in the games are based off real places, mostly in Japan. For instance, the Kanto region is named after a part of Japan, and several of the towns correspond to real cities in the area (for instance, Vermillion City is based on Yokohama, and Saffron City and Celadon City are supposed to represent different parts of Tokyo). Even the Cycling Road is based off a real bridge, which was being built in Tokyo Bay during the game's production. As more regions have been introduced, the more closely they correspond to their real-life locations, including in their mechanics. For instance, the Berry Fields in Alola correspond to the location of Dole's pineapple plantation on Oahu; and the town of Ballonlea in Galar, where a major performance theater is located, matches up with Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's home town.
    • Probopass is often regarded as an arbitrary goofy evolution of Nosepass. Aside from the mustache, that's what the restored moai face actually looks like, with Nosepass being the version more well known to popular culture.
    • At first, the Galarian fossil Pokémon were just assumed to be mish-mashes of two fossils portions in the hands of a hack palaeontologist, but the truth stems from Chimera Fossils, or the early days of palaeontology where they simply put together whatever fossils they found and made their presumptions about ancient life from those days.
    • Many players of Pokémon Sun and Moon found it bizarre that Alola, a tropical archipelago themed on Hawaii, could have places where it snows all year round. This is in fact the case with its highest altitudes, and the same goes for Alola where it snows as you reach the summit of Mt. Lanakila.
    • The reason why Crabrawler, resembling a crab, does not have the Water-type is because it's based on the coconut crab. Coconut crabs spend their entire adult lives on land; they can only breathe air.
    • Galar Route 6 in Pokémon Sword and Shield has what appears to be an out-of-place desert in a region themed on the British Isles. In fact, some areas of Dungeness have low enough rainfall that there is debate on whether or not they're deserts, though it doesn't match with Route 6's location nor is it dry and dusty the way Route 6 appears.
    • Galarian Meowth and Perrserker are Viking-themed Pokémon who debuted in a place with a heavy United Kingdom theme. Though deliberately out-of-place Pokémon have been done before, like the beaver-like Bibarel debuting in the Hokkaido-themed Sinnoh or the koala-like Komala debuting in the Hawaii-themed Alola, this is not the case with these two feline Pokémon—not only did Vikings settle on the British Isles centuries ago and continue to live there to the present day, they kept cats on board their ships for companionship and to hunt rats that might have stowed aboard.
    • In Pokémon Sleep, the 2024 Pokemon Sleep Champion Tournament is an April Fool's joke, but there's a real napping competition held annually in Madrid.
  • Portal 2:
    • All of Wheatley's "hacking" attempts actually are like real-life forms of hacking, and are in fact more realistic than most forms of Hollywood Hacking. His attempt to shut down the facility by "guessing" the password by systematically going AAAAAAA, AAAAAAB, etc, is known as a "Brute Force" attack, where a password is cracked systematically digit-by-digit, with the only difference being real technology can do it millions of times faster: it would take a computer less than a second to brute-force a 7 digit passcode of only letters. His "hacking" doors and walls by just smashing through the windows is akin to a Backdoor Exploit, where one bypasses authentication and security systems by effectively bypassing them entirely.
    • With all the weirdness and silly humor associated with the series, you'd think that Cave Johnson's moon rock poisoning was just another silly joke. In fact, lunar dust is an actual hazard to humans. It's just as destructive to human lungs as asbestos, since it's just as sharp and brittle unlike earth dust, which has been rounded by natural actions (wind, rain, etc) that don't exist on the moon, and you will die a slow, horrible death if you breathe in too much of the stuff. The developers were likely very aware of this as they made a point of talking about the dangers of asbestos during one of the test chambers.
  • Rainbow Six Siege's limited time event Outbreak takes place in Truth and Consequences, New Mexico, an actual city.
  • In Red Dead Redemption 2, the protagonists are hunted by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was a real organization empowered by the federal government as law enforcment. Pinkerton still exists as a brand (the company itself is part of Securitias) and they no longer operate in any law enforcement capacity and today they only provide security guard and private investigation services under the Pinkerton name.
  • Resistance: Fall Of Man: Until the controversy erupted over its use in the game, many fans had assumed that Manchester Cathedral was a fictional inclusion.
  • Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and their remakes take a lot of ribbing from their fans for having characters get infected and then cured with vaccines because, as we all know vaccines prevent rather than treat right? There actually are vaccines, called therapeutic vaccines, that treat existing infections rather than preventing future ones which work by enhancing the immune system response rather than providing an acquired immunity to a future infection, and while the first successful one to be approved by the FDA didn't come out until 2010, these things were actually being researched as early as the '70s. In fact, in real life a therapeutic vaccine reasonably would be used to treat a virus that caused mutations, as such vaccines in real life are used to treat viruses and cancer, meaning it actually would be reasonably possible for such a thing to not only destroy a virus but reverse malignant tissue growth the virus had caused.
  • A surprisingly large number of people think the M3 Carbine in Return to Castle Wolfenstein is some crazy fictional gun. Nope, it just wasn't silenced, or used during the war. Same for the FG42 Paratrooper rifle, another rare real-life gun.
  • Most of the tourist attractions in Sam & Max Hit the Road are based on exaggerations of real ones. Including the Mystery Vortex, although the size-changing effect isn't quite as drastic in real life.
  • Samurai Warriors. The self-proclaimed "demon king", the rampant homoeroticism, the ridiculous headgear◊—all well-documented historical facts.
  • The Sims:
    • For many non-US players, The Sims 2 was their introduction to grilled cheese sandwiches.
    • Daniel and Jennifer Pleasant in The Sims, Cassandra and Alexander Goth in The Sims 2, and Siobhan and Morgan Fyres in The Sims 4 are siblings with very different skin color. Sounds like an attempt at Hollywood Genetics or they were meant to be step-siblings, right? Actually, it is not unheard of for full siblings to have different color skin including the contrast between each of those examples.
  • Almost all of the secret projects in the Sniper Elite series are real Nazi projects. Some are just more believable than others. While most people know some things like the V2 Rockets in Sniper Elite V2 is famous enough that people know it is based on the real thing, others may look like Stupid Jetpack Hitler projects. The Ratte in Sniper Elite III is a real proposed land battleship project which was eventually abandoned due to being Awesome, but Impractical. The radio guided Fritz-X bomb in Sniper Elite 4 is a real thing, and is the same bomb responsible for sinking the battleship Roma and severely damaging many other ships, including the Warspite.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Doctor Eggman's real name is "Ivo Robotnik" and it isn't just a fake Punny Name. "Robotnik" is an actual Eastern European word, specifically a Polish and Slovak word, which translates to "worker". Even his first name, "Ivo", is Slavic.
    • Eggman's deceased cousin Maria Robotnik was born with a rare illness called "Neuro-Immune Deficiency Syndrome" that weakens both the nervous system and the immune system. NIDS itself is fictional, but it's based on real disorders. In Japan, NIDS is referred to in supplementary material as a "primary immunodeficiency" disorder and a "hereditary immune deficiency syndrome", which are both real diagnoses.
    • Some Sonic characters are based on real animals that may seem too obscure or implausible to be real. For example, while they don't resemble Knuckles or have most of his abilities, echidnas are a real animal (they're one of two egg-laying mammals along with the platypus). And while it may seem silly that Fang is able to bounce around on his tail, he's supposed to be a jerboa, a relative of the kangaroo that does in fact use its tail to jump.
  • Soul Series:
  • Splatoon 2 has a couple of off-handed mentions of a place called "Mount Nantai" in various character dialogue from the single-player campaigns. Made up for the game? Nope—as you might be able to tell from the lack of fish puns in its name, it's a real volcano in Nikko National Park on Honshu, not far from Tokyo (which Inkopolis is implied to be a far-future version of). It's well-known inside of Japan, but foreign audiences probably only know it from this game.
  • Stardew Valley:
    • Elders Lewis and George will sometimes ask for Hot Peppers for their bad knees. Weird in-game folk remedy? Nope. Capsaicin, the burning chemical in hot peppers, is a well-documented pain reliever frequently used for arthritis medicine.
    • There are real-life sashimi varieties that use shellfish, and even snails. However, only certain species should be prepared this way, by an expert, due to pollutants and parasites.
  • Syphon Filter 2 has the caseless round-firing H11 assault rifle. Looks and sounds like science fiction, but it's actually a renamed version of the G11, a real caseless weapon that came very close to being mass-produced before things happened to the Soviet Union's fate that cut into its funding. Also, the BIZ-2 is a renamed PP-19 Bizon, which used a unique helical magazine. Even Harsher in Hindsight, there have been real-life cases of people being set on fire by tasers.
  • In Tales of Arise, Kisara's armour is backless, with the justification given that she wanted to increase mobility and reduce its weight. This was actually a real (although rare) practice, where some knights believed that if an enemy managed to get behind them, they were screwed anyways, so they might as well make their armour easier to wear.
  • The Demoman from Team Fortress 2 is a black Scotsman. While this may seem like Rule of Funny, Scotland actually does have a small population of African descent.
    They got more (extended censorship bleeping) than they got the likes o' me!
    • Sun Tzu really did say that "If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight!" Everything else that the Soldier says about Sun Tzu, however, is a complete fabrication.
  • In Wario Land 4, the owner of the Item Shop offers Wario a smile for free. This is actually a reference to the menu of McDonald's Japan, where a smile is something one can order for 0 yen.
  • The Wind Road have one of the bosses, the Gobi Bear, who's fought in a desert, which might lead to players calling Misplaced Wildlife. NOPE - the Gobi Bear is an animal that actually does exist, and is the only desert-dwelling ursine species.
  • In Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, one of the player's allies is a Communist Christian named Horton Boone. Whilst Communism is predominantly thought of as an anti-religious philosophy, and some of its founders did issue strong statements against organized religion, Christian Socialism was - and still is! - a real thing, arguing that Socialism is the kind of government structure that Jesus would support and wish for humanity to adopt.note 
  • The World Ends with You has the sewer at the end of the game: just another Absurdly Spacious Sewer, right? Nope, that sewer really exists in Shibuya.
  • Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim:
    • Baslam is a merchant who built a town, gathering the stone by dismantling ruins of priceless historical value. It sounds like a comically over-the-top bit of Corrupt Corporate Executive behavior, medieval fantasy-style... unless you know this has actually been done in real life. Multiple times. Medieval Cairo was built by raiding limestone from the pyramids, the Renaissance Italians would tear marble off of Roman buildings and melt down statues in order to get the materials needed for their own works, and numerous houses built in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War contain identifiable pieces salvaged from castles destroyed by artillery. Even in modern times, this still happens, such as pyramids in Belize getting carved out as road material by corrupt politicians.
    • Famously, the Rosetta stone is an artifact that presented an edict side-by-side in hieroglyphic ancient Egyptian, Demotic ancient Egyptian, and ancient Greek, providing the basis for the translation of hieroglyphics. It was discovered after being incorporated into the structure of a fort built by the Ottoman Empire and later occupied by the French.

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