Historical Video Games List

We are a team of students of computer science and history class whose hobbies are also everything the gaming industry has to offer. We love computer games, and for the interprofessional collaboration project, we have merged computer science and history. Together, we build up this website, researching video games with historical aspects. With the much-appreciated help of friends running the AscINC.com gaming web site, we were able to get in our hands some powerful gaming PCs and laptops. As for a computer science part of a project, we run benchmarks and stress tests on these gaming laptops and research their optimization, game engines built upon, etc.

We believe historically themed games do a much better job teaching why some historical actions took place rather than just what and when. Of course, even in an exceptional historical video game, you might not be learning the same stuff you would learn in class, but the history you learn will start to make a bit more sense. And that’s great.

Some genres of video games (mostly role-playing games) are full of arcana, driving from ancient civilizations. Of course, it’s not always historically accurate, and even the ones that try to get it right have to take some liberties with the facts modern scholarship hands down to us to be an entertaining game. But there is a definite divide between games that explain some parts of history and those that put in enough research time to get at least some of the essential facts accurate.

It’s no easy to measure a “historicity” when it comes to games. Games that focus on history may end up overly complicated rather than fun. We highlighted genuinely exceptional PC games that go out of their way to include some historical accuracy. We listed video games that accurately and ably portray a facet of history often understated or neglected in other, purportedly historical games.

In chronological order based on the release date, these are the most historical PC games.