10 Video Games Based On Real Life Stories

10. Secret Files: Tunguska

What is it about Siberia which attracts adventure game scribes so much? Four years after Benoît Sokal took us to the far northern reaches of Russia in his misspelled magnum opus Syberia, adventure game designer Jörg Beilschmidt jetted us back via Novosibirsk in Secret Files: Tunguska, a game which had flown largely under the radar like a Soviet spy plane before its Switch re-release last year.

What starts out as a hunt for her suddenly vanished father soon evolves into an epic quest across the four corners of the, er, globe, as amateur detective Nina seeks to solve the century-old mystery of the Tunguska catastrophe, a gargantuan explosion which torched the area to a crisp.

It sounds like fanciful video game fare, but the Tunguska event actually happened. 2000 square kilometres of the Taiga forest were decimated in a moment of cosmic chaos, widely attributed by scientists to the air burst of a meteor - a sort of intergalactic grenade. Boffins estimated that the blast hit with an impact over one thousand times than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima - though the consequences to human life were nowhere near as catastrophic; luckily, there wasn't a single fatality.