When media decides to play with history, it is always more inaccurate rather than accurate. After all, history can be difficult to keep track of when you are also trying to make a piece of entertainment. While some companies try to boost their historical accuracy, others sometimes just throw accuracy out the door despite making a game that deals with real history.
Here are games that for better or worse, are very inaccurate depictions of history.
10 The Assassin’s Creed Series
While Assassin’s Creed was inspired by a real guild of assassins like that of the first game, there is a lot to talk about when it comes to inaccuracy in this series. The real guild of assassins were defeated by Mongols in the Middle Ages. Their ideology was also quite different, as they were religious heretics in their day and were not very secretive about it either.
The series also made bold moves by putting a lot of famous historical figures in their games. They mix in their fiction with reality to the point where the franchise is more like an alternate history rather than anything else.
9 Bladestorm: The Hundred Years’ War
This game covers the Hundred Years’ War, which is a fascinating part of European history. However, the creators seemed to have wanted to make a game more similar to Final Fantasy than to actually make a historically-inspired game. Characters swing glowing weapons, Joan of Arc looks like she is from an anime, and Edward the Black Prince looks like he belongs in Dirge of Cerberus.
It is honestly worth checking out just to laugh at if you know the real history of the Hundred Years’ War.
8 Dino D-Day
Now this is just obvious. Those who made this game had no desire to make it accurate to history. Instead, they wanted to integrate dinosaurs with WWII.
Why this is on the list though is the sheer irony of it all. The fact is that they surprisingly made very realistic and historically accurate WWII weapons in the game. So the weapons are accurate, which most games get wrong. However, there are dinosaurs. You can’t have everything.
7 Battlefield 1
This first-person shooter takes place in World War I. It came out in 2016 and was well received. While the weapons look good, they are not quite accurate to WWI’s history. In defense of the game though, players probably would not have been happy if they had to reload their guns as slowly as reloading actually was back in WWI. So accuracy was mostly sacrificed in order to make the game more fun.
If you want to learn a lot more, PC Gamer actually interviewed a historian about how inaccurate the game is.
6 Robin Hood: Defender Of The Crown
Robin Hood has turned from folklore legend to king of historical inaccuracy with how much he has been put into films, T.V. shows, and games that are based in historical England. This game is funny, because Robin Hood slowly conquers England! Richard the Lionheart has been captured and held for ransom. The biggest inaccuracy to Robin Hood’s legend is that he raises the taxation of locals in order to pay off Richard’s ransom.
It is true that King Richard was captured by Leopold V of Austria and his ransom was raised through taxation. However, making Robin Hood do that is insane since he was a folk-hero that fought against the oppression of the lower classes, not for making them pay a ransom for a King.
5 Medal Of Honor: Underground
Serving as a prequel to Medal of Honor, this first-person shooter focuses on a female protagonist who is recruited by the OSS to foil Nazi plans in North Africa and Europe. The protagonist is actually based on a real woman, Helene Deschamps Adams, which is pretty cool. However, she was a secretary-spy, not someone who gunned down a ton of Nazi troops.
The game gets ridiculous by the fourth mission as you fight Nazi’s wearing medieval armor with swords. By the way, bullets can get through medieval armor. However, the game claims that the armor is “bullet-resistant.”
4 The Saboteur
This part of history this game took place in was a fascinating idea. It was all about the French resistance to a Nazi-occupied Paris. However, the historical integrity of this game gets a little embarrassing. The Nazis have weapons that did not yet exist and their facilities look like something out of science fiction.
If you like steampunk, then this is the game for you. If you wanted to see a WWII version of Paris, then you best look elsewhere.
3 Rome: Total War
This game was a little confusing for history enthusiasts because it would get some amazingly small details about history right and then totally reinvent major parts. A lot of people have complained about the inaccuracies.
Inaccuracies include Roman ninjas, yubtseb elephants, explosive rounds for ballistaes, head hurlers, and an Egypt that looks like it’s from the Mummy movies.
2 Shadow Of Rome
To be fair, most of those who played this game did not do it for historical accuracy. If you did, you would be disappointed.
The game starts off as a murder mystery for who killed Julius Caesar. The real history though, is that he was killed in public and the killers were pretty obvious. In the game, they go into hiding and frame the protagonists’ father for it.
1 Dante’s Inferno
If you studied Dante’s Inferno in school, then you would know why this game is embarrassing in a historical sense. Dante, the main character, was actually a real person and he was the guy who wrote the story in the first place. So yes, the book is actually self-insert fan-fiction. Dante was not by any means a man who murdered, knew combat, or had a beautiful ghost wife that he was chasing after.
In reality, he was a poet and politician. We can also argue that he was a fanboy of the Roman poet, Virgil, since he stuck that man into his self-insert religious fan fiction.
