Have you ever played a video game and thought, “Could this actually be real?” or “Could the events or places in this game really exist?” This article will explore video games that are inspired by real events or are based on events that could happen in our world. Please note, if you’re planning to play any of these games, be aware that some may contain the following: Blood/Gore, Strong Language, Drugs/Alcohol, and Body Horror.
The Outlast Trials
The Outlast Trials is a 2024 first-person survival horror game developed and published by Red Barrels. It is the third installment in the Outlast series, serving as a prequel to the 2013 video game Outlast. The game features test subjects in a mysterious Cold War experiment.
The Plot
The Outlast Trials takes place in 1959, at the height of the Cold War, when the Murkoff Corporation begins a deceptive recruitment program targeting individuals to the Sinyala Facility in Arizona, where they are forced to undergo an involuntary surgical procedure to have night vision goggles screwed onto their heads. The player(s) must complete a set number of objectives while evading monstrous enemies.
How could this game become real?
The Outlast Trials draws inspiration from real-world experiments from the Cold War era, specifically the MKUltra program that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. This program was a human experimentation initiative designed to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 2 is a 2019 survival horror game developed and published by Capcom, a remake of the 1998 game Resident Evil 2. Players take control of rookie police officer Leon S. Kennedy and college student Claire Redfield as they attempt to escape Raccoon City during a zombie outbreak.
The Plot
Resident Evil 2 is about Leon S. Kennedy, who is on his way to Raccoon City to start his first shift at the Raccoon City Police Department. At a gas station on the city outskirts, Leon runs into Claire Redfield, who is looking for her brother, Chris Redfield. When the gas station is severely overrun by zombies, the two make their way to the police station but are separated when a truck crashes and explodes.
How could this game become real?
The T-virus in Resident Evil causes severe brain damage, murderous aggression, and an obsessive hunger. This is what drives the infected to seek out and attack anyone who has not already been infected. The virus also causes necrosis (the medical term for the death of body tissue), which makes the zombies slow, while they retain most of their strength. In the real world, Marburg is a very severe virus that causes bleeding from all over the body (ex: nosebleeds, bleeding gums, vomiting blood, etc.), turning the infected into a bloody, infectious mess until they likely succumb to organ failure. Marburg has many similarities to the T-virus, but Marburg alone wouldn’t explain the hostile biting and hunger. That’s where rabies comes in. If researchers could somehow combine the genes of something like Marburg and rabies, they could create a bio-engineered superpathogen resembling the T-Virus. Thankfully, many countries ended this possibility by signing the Biological Weapons Convention in the mid-1970s, which “prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons.” However, there is little doubt that, in a desperate situation or conflict, this treaty could be disregarded as a last resort.
The Last of Us
The Last of Us is a 2013 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Players take control of Joel, a smuggler tasked with escorting a teenage girl, Ellie, across a post-apocalyptic United States.
The Plot
In 2013, an outbreak of a mutant Cordyceps fungus ravages the United States, and in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, Joel flees the chaos with his brother Tommy and daughter Sarah. As they flee, Sarah is shot by a soldier and dies in Joel’s arms. Twenty years later, civilization has been decimated by the infection. Joel works as a smuggler with his partner Tess. While hunting down a black-market dealer to recover a stolen weapons cache he had traded with the Fireflies, the leader of a rebel militia offers to double the cache in return for smuggling a teenage girl, Ellie.
How could this game become real?
The virus in this game is based on the Cordyceps fungus, a real fungus that, when exposed, lands on your skin and attempts to penetrate it, growing inside your body. In reality, the Cordyceps fungus only infects insects like ants, spiders, caterpillars, beetles, and butterflies. In The Last of Us, however, the Cordyceps fungus is a mutated version capable of infecting humans. The mutated fungus infects the brain, taking control of its host’s body. It spreads through the central nervous system, causing intense aggression, impaired motor skills, and, eventually, the host’s complete loss of consciousness. In reality, the Cordyceps fungus cannot penetrate human skin, and even if it did manage to enter a human’s body, it would die because the human body temperature is too high for it to survive. For the Cordyceps fungus to infect mammals, millions of years of evolution would be required.
Conclusion
From the games you’ve seen here, just remember that they are a possibility. Some of these events could happen tomorrow, while others may never occur in our lifetime.
