Alternative history is a fun story idea to play with. It makes you ask a lot of questions, such as what would have happened if Germany won World War II? Or what would happen if certain famous people were never assassinated? Despite how big the world is, every little aspect of history is important as a building block for our lives today.
So what if history changed? Some video games like to answer that question. Here are over a dozen games that explore worlds where history was altered.
Updated February 25, 2023 by Dennis Moiseyev: Crafting a narrative around alternate historical events continues to be a plot device favored in games and one that makes for more enticing worlds, just recently evidenced by Atomic Heart. Manipulating significant events throughout our history is a creative subject to engage with, and all the games here execute it exceptionally well.
15 The Outer Worlds
Though The Outer Worlds is set all the way forward in the far future of 2355, the altered historical event that forms the basis of its narrative occurred over 450 years back in our past. In this timeline, President William McKinley was never assassinated in 1901, so Vice President Teddy Roosevelt never got a chance to become a US President and govern with his antitrust agenda.
Therefore, tons of megacorporations conquered the future of society like in Cyberpunk 2077, except that these took to colonizing and terraforming space and establishing the Halcyon system as a part of the program, which is where you end up. And in true Obsidian style, you play from the first-person in this branching RPG game to shape the outcomes on Halcyon.
14 The Order: 1886
Set in England's Victorian Age in 1886, The Order: 1886 envisions an alternate steampunk London society during the Industrial Revolution with highly advanced weaponry and a Lycan threat. A distinguished order dating back to the time of King Arthur and his knights, much like the Kingsman, is in charge of neutralizing these half-human, half-werewolf hybrids.
You play as one of those agents in the Order called Sir Galahad, capable of immortality through Blackwater and who encounters many historical figures like Marquis de Lafayette. It's a linear chapter-based story that features incredibly immersive sound design and impressive visuals and graphics, especially for it being an early PS4 title.
13 The Resistance Series
This first-person shooter alternate history series comes from Insomniac, developers of Ratchet & Clank, and Marvel's Spider-Man. The first game was called Resistance: Fall of Man in 2006, and it envisions a 1950s world in which the major World Wars couldn't even play out due to a more pressing alien threat at the beginning of the 20th century.
An extraterrestrial parasitic species known as Chimera launched a full-scale invasion of Europe in the first game and then arrived in the US in the events of the second game. Therefore, the global-scale war in the late 40s and 50s is one with the Chimera in the Resistance series.
12 Homefront And Homefront: The Revolution
The Homefront games are both standalone stories centered around the alternate histories of two distinct periods of the rogue state of North Korea. 2011's Homefront sees Kim Jong-un reunifying with South Korea after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, to form the Greater Korean Republic, which eventually invades the US.
Homefront: The Revolution re-imagines the North Korean occupancy of the US that starts in the 1970s with Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un's grandfather, being ousted from power by the APEX Corporation. The protagonists across both games differ but are resistance fighters who seek to push the Korean forces out of their homeland.
11 The Wolfenstein Series
The premise of the Wolfenstein series is that the Nazis won World War II and went on to dominate the world. How did they win it? They found a secret underground vault filled with highly advanced technology made by a secret society of Jewish scientists and decided to drop an atomic bomb on New York City.
Throughout the games, you get into bloody, brutal FPS combat with armored Nazis, giant mechs, and sometimes a car chase with fire-breathing robot hounds. Playing as resistance leader BJ Blazkowicz and later his twin daughters, you also wear a high-tech exo-suit when going against the Nazi regime.
10 Atomic Heart
The alternate history of WWII in Atomic Heart sees the Soviet Union emerge as the big victor in the conflict, thanks to the development of advanced Polymer technology by USSR scientist and robotic AI engineer Dr. Dmitry Sechenov. Sechenov also creates machine mutants under a neural network of AI called Kollectiv 1.0, all from a utopian civilization in the clouds called Facility 3826.
As in all science-fiction narratives where AI is at the forefront, the neural network goes rogue and causes the robots to slaughter most of the Facility's personnel. And Sechenov relies on you, cybernetically enhanced former KGB agent Major Sergey Nechaev, or P-3, to help deal with this mess.
9 The Assassin's Creed Series
Assassin's Creed deals with a lot of real historical characters and places, from Ancient Greece and Egypt to the Industrial Revolution, but often gets a lot of criticism for its inaccuracies. So in that sense, it does lean more toward being an alternate-history game. What makes their history different is that humans are not the only dominant race on Earth.
There was another that went extinct a very, very long time ago. However, they left holograms behind to warn humankind about a second apocalypse. And the dueling orders of the Templars and Assassins have waged war over the technology of the extinct Isu race for centuries throughout time.
8 The Chaos Engine
Here we have the oldest game on the list, dating back to 1993. It is steampunk and takes place in Victorian England. In The Chaos Engine, history alternates because a time traveler accidentally got his technology taken at the hands of the Royal Society, led by inventor Baron Fortesque. So the inventor creates futuristic technology based on what the time traveler had, thus alternating history.
The invention was indeed a Chaos Engine that warps reality and ruins everything for England, leaving it infested with monsters. For those interested, the game has been remastered and put on Steam and can also be two-player, so you and a friend can enjoy it together.
7 We Happy Few
Released in 2018, We Happy Few is a whimsically dark and creepy game that again deals with another alternate history involving a different outcome to World War II. In this version, FDR is assassinated, and the US never enters the war, allowing Germany to become an empire that takes over England.
The game sets the story in Wellington Wells in 1964. But not all is well in this dreary and artificially joyous utopic society. The people had to do something terrible involving children and created a hallucinogenic drug to make themselves forget. However, this goes sideways very quickly. The drug makes them happy, but they also have no morals anymore.
6 The BioShock Series
BioShock dives richly into many alternate parts of history through its installments that may become rather difficult to pin down since Infinite introduces the concept of numerous alternate timelines. The games explore an alternate future where technology advances faster, which is why you see it in the historical period where they're set.
The first two games take place after the second World War in an underwater city engineered by Andrew Ryan known as Rapture, built to escape the clutches of nuclear war and communism. BioShock Infinite pivots even further back to 1912 in an equally isolated cloud city called Columbia, following a former Pinkerton agent who also fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee.
5 The Fallout Series
In Fallout, the United States got bombed into a nuclear wasteland by China. An interesting part of the game is that the 50s never quite ended, but technology got boosted. So while you have 50s-style advertisements, music, and fashion, you also got robots, mech suits, and plasma rifles.
The game series focuses a lot on its alternative history and themes of American history, as you can find old pre-war documents about what was going on before the bombs fell. The devastation from the nuclear fallout also left the world in a much different state, with giant mutated creatures and zombie-like ghouls roaming the landscape.
4 Damnation
This science-fiction steampunk western came out in 2009 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows to not-so-stellar reviews. The graphics, gameplay, and voice acting were all sadly quite terrible, which is a shame since the alternate history idea sounds extremely original and could've had much going for it.
Damnation is set against the backdrop of a prolonged American Civil War, where Abraham Lincoln loses his presidency to an inventor of advanced technology named Prescott, and figures such as Edison and Tesla are erased from history. The game aims for Gears of War-style gameplay with a futuristic western flair but falters.
3 Prey
One major way history was altered in Prey was that President Kennedy was never assassinated, so he got to fund way more into space exploration. Aside from JFK, many philanthropists and rich people banded together and got into space stations. And soon an alien race called the Typhon was also discovered by the Soviet Union.
Capturing these was a coordinated effort by the US and USSR, but the Typhon eventually end up falling into a US corporation's hands, where they ultimately escape containment. The study of these creatures allowed humans to create devices capable of re-writing parts of the human brain in seconds. So if you want to be a piano prodigy, you can easily become one.
2 The Stalker Series
The first game of this series came out in 2007, followed by two other installments, and the highly-anticipated Heart of Chornobyl will be the latest entry in the universe. The theme and world are based loosely on a book called Roadside Picnic by brothers Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky.
Stalker takes place in a world where the Chernobyl incident experienced a second meltdown that created anomalies in space-time and mutated people and animals into weird creatures that can turn invisible, move quickly, and have a thirst for human blood. A lot of people are salvagers who brave the radioactive wasteland to find valuable artifacts and sell them. This creates factions, fights, and a lot of other kinds of fun.
1 Freedom Fighters
What sets history apart from ours in Freedom Fighters is that World War II was ended by Russia, which dropped the first nuclear bomb on Berlin. So it's now Russia who starts running the world and invades the United States. Strangely enough, the main characters here are brothers working in plumbing in New York City. Talk about unlikely heroes.
Also, plumbing brothers? That sounds oddly familiar to some certain famous Nintendo characters. It's truly one of those PlayStation 2 games that need a remaster, as it both had an interesting alternate history and great reviews across the board.