I’ve spent a genuinely embarrassing number of hours inside fictional cities. Midgar at 2am. Rapture on a Sunday afternoon. Los Santos on what felt like every bank holiday for three years running. And the longer I spend in these places, the more one very specific thought keeps nagging at me: a UK fire marshal would absolutely lose their mind. Not metaphorically. We’re talking clipboard-snapping, hi-vis-vest-sweating, full-scale professional meltdown. Video game cities fire safety is, frankly, a disaster waiting to happen. Multiple disasters. Simultaneously. On different floors.
Let’s do this properly. I’m rating five iconic game cities against the actual requirements set out under the UK Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which governs commercial and public premises across England and Wales. The criteria are real. The violations are extremely fictional. The danger feels very, very genuine.
Midgar (Final Fantasy VII), structural chaos with added mako leakage
Midgar is a city built on top of another city, suspended on a giant metal plate, powered by reactors that literally suck the life out of the planet. From a fire safety standpoint, I don’t even know where to start. Actually, I do. The plate itself.
The upper plate has exactly one documented escape route for the population below: falling through it when Shinra blows the thing up. That is not a compliant emergency exit. UK fire regs require clearly marked, unobstructed escape routes with adequate lighting. The slums beneath the plate have zero natural light, a network of alleyways that double back on themselves like a very angry maze, and exposed electrical wiring that would make an NICEIC-registered electrician weep openly. Mako reactors produce heat, radiation-adjacent energy, and presumably some kind of noxious vapour. There are no working sprinklers. There is no assembly point. There is a flower girl, but she cannot legally serve as a fire warden without proper training and a certificate.
Verdict: Immediate prohibition notice. Evacuate everyone. Shut the reactors. Then probably shut the planet down for a full risk assessment.
Rapture (BioShock), underwater, flooded, on fire somehow
Rapture is an art deco city at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, built by a libertarian who explicitly rejected the concept of government oversight. You can probably see where the fire safety angle is going.
By the time you arrive in 1960, Rapture is partially flooded, partially on fire, and entirely populated by people who’ve injected themselves with genetic material to the point of psychological collapse. The fire marshal would step through the bathysphere, take one look at the burst pipes pouring water over exposed electrical panels, and immediately turn around. Blocked fire doors propped open with plasmid canisters. Sparking overhead lights flickering over puddles. Ryan Industries signage hanging from a single bolt. And the smell. I’d imagine the smell alone would violate about four separate sections of the Health and Safety at Work Act.
To be fair to Rapture, some areas do have functional splicer-proof doors. But those doors lock from the outside and are designed to trap you, not help you escape. That’s essentially the opposite of what a fire exit is for. Rapture scores zero out of ten. It gets a bonus minus point for being technically impossible to evacuate because you’re under the sea.
Los Santos (GTA V), technically compliant, until absolutely not
Los Santos is the most interesting case, because on the surface it looks like a functioning city. There are proper roads. Shops. A working airport. You’d think someone, somewhere, had signed off on a fire risk assessment for the Maze Bank Tower.
And then you spend five minutes there.
The problem with Los Santos isn’t the architecture. It’s the residents. Car fires happen approximately every ninety seconds. Petrol stations explode if you look at them with mild intent. The police response to any situation involving smoke is to add gunfire, which historically does not improve fire safety outcomes. I once watched a lorry clip a lamp post outside the Vanilla Unicorn and set off a chain reaction that took out half a city block. No fire brigade arrived for eleven minutes. Ofcom would have something to say about the emergency broadcast system too, given that the in-game radio just kept playing.
For flooring alone, the interiors of Los Santos properties are a case study in what not to do. Slippery surfaces near exits, no anti-slip treatment in commercial kitchens, questionable choices in high-footfall areas. Speaking of which, if you want to see what genuinely compliant safety flooring looks like in real-world commercial environments, Macfloor is worth a look. Los Santos, clearly, has never heard of them.
Verdict: Conditional pass on the buildings. Catastrophic fail on everything else. Trevor’s properties don’t even get a conditional pass.
Hyrule Castle Town (Zelda: Ocarina of Time), medieval, and it shows
Look, I understand that Hyrule is a fantasy medieval kingdom and expecting it to comply with modern fire legislation is perhaps ambitious. But the castle market town is presented as a bustling, populated settlement with tight alleyways, thatched-adjacent structures, and a literal volcano visible from the centre. You can see Death Mountain from the shop where you buy bombs. You are purchasing explosives within eyeline of an active volcano.
The castle itself has candles everywhere. Torches lining every corridor. No stone compartmentalisation between floors that would slow the spread of fire. The drawbridge is the only way in or out of the entire upper town area, which means that in a genuine fire emergency, exactly one escape route exists, and it requires someone at the top of a tower to manually lower it. That person is the gate guard, who, in my experience of this game, is not always present.
Hyrule Castle Town fails on means of escape, fire detection, fire-fighting equipment, and structural compartmentalisation. But it does have a very nice fountain in the middle. That’s something.
Raccoon City (Resident Evil 2 and 3), the absolute worst
Raccoon City doesn’t just fail a fire safety inspection. Raccoon City fails at existing as a city. By the time you’re navigating the Raccoon City Police Department, the building has been abandoned mid-shift, most of the lights are out, blood is on the floors, and the fire suppression system has been specifically disabled by the villain’s organisation to prevent evidence being destroyed. So someone actively sabotaged the sprinklers. That’s not just a building regulations violation. That’s a criminal offence under the Fire Safety Act 2021.
The RCPD also has boarded-up windows, barricaded corridors, random explosive barrels placed next to filing cabinets, and a basement laboratory operating illegal biological experiments beneath what is nominally a public safety building. The fire marshal would arrive, review the risk assessment (there isn’t one), attempt to locate the responsible person under the 2005 Order (he’s been eaten), and promptly call the HSE, the police, and probably MI5.
Raccoon City is so dangerous from a fire safety perspective that the government’s eventual solution was to nuke the entire city from orbit. Which, honestly, I think the fire marshal would have signed off on early if given the paperwork.
Honourable mentions and how they’d appeal the decision
A few cities didn’t make the main list but deserve a note. Novigrad from The Witcher 3 would probably scrape a pass on the fire exits, but the persecution-fuelled bonfires happening in the main square are an obvious concern. Columbia from BioShock Infinite is a floating city powered by unknown energy, which the HSE would classify as a novel hazard requiring a specialist assessment before any rating could be issued. And Dunwall from Dishonored has rats. So many rats. Rats are listed as a fire risk in UK property guidance because they chew through wiring. Dunwall would fail on rats alone before you even got to the whale oil.
If you enjoyed this descent into bureaucratic chaos, you might also appreciate our look at which sci-fi movie technologies would be immediately shut down by UK regulators, or the equally grim findings from our MOT assessment of famous sci-fi spaceships. The pattern, as you’ll notice, is that fictional worlds are having a very bad time with British compliance standards. And honestly? Good. Someone has to hold them accountable.
Final rankings, quickfire: Raccoon City (actively illegal), Rapture (physically impossible to make safe), Midgar (prohibited pending structural survey), Hyrule Castle Town (medieval, not exempt), Los Santos (chaotic neutral). None of them pass. Not one. I’d give Hyrule’s fountain a small certificate of merit, but that’s as far as I’m going.
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