Atlantis



"The continent of Atlantis was an island, which lay before the Great Flood in the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean... Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent ships to all corners of the world. On board were the Twelve - the poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist, the magician, and the other so-called gods of our legends, though gods they were."

- Donovan, Atlantis

""...In a single day and night of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea.""

- Plato, Critias

The fabled lost Utopia, often described as sinking due to man's hubris and descent into decadence. A common setting with many interpretations, and some times just generally used as a stock setting for fantasy and speculative fiction stories. Generally it's an Advanced Ancient Acropolis chock full of Functional Magic, and/or Lost Technology. Aliens or Google Earth may also come into play.

It doesn't necessarily have to be Atlantis per se to tap into the myth fabric of the setting, but it can be any sort of lost civilization that had great achievements and then were mysteriously lost. Other examples include Mu (Pacific Ocean), Lemuria (Indian Ocean) or Thule (Arctic Ocean)...heck, even "Antediluvia" (literally, "Land Before The Deluge"), in Christian settings. Often the capital city of the Precursors.

Due to the connection with the city being an island that sunk, mermaids are often connected to it. Such as the people of the city surviving by learning to breathe water really quick in the Underwater Ruins, even rebuilding them into an Underwater City.

Historically, "Atlantis" draws on ancient myths from various cultures, but the main details are drawn from Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, where it is a Fictional Counterpart for Athens, used as a template for his vision of the ideal society. In this original version it was an all-conquering empire only successfully resisted by his ideal Athens, which was destroyed in the same cataclysm.

Unfortunately, if it's under the sea, it will be less interesting than it sounds.

Anime and Manga

 * Vision of Escaflowne had Atlanteans as the creators of the world on which the story takes place.
 * One plot-arc in Yu-Gi-Oh! involves saving the world from the power which destroyed Atlantis. As a nod to Plato, the arc involves three Atlantean dragons, named "Critius", "Timaeus", and "Hermos", nods to the characters of Critius, Timaeus, and Hermocrates in Timaeus and Critias.
 * The main character of Secret of Blue Water is the last descendant of the Atlanteans, who are actually aliens.
 * In Transformers Armada, the poor lost civilization gets even more destroyed in a battle for a plot device.
 * In Transformers Super God Masterforce, Atlantis was the tomb of Gilmer.
 * Transformers Cybertron: Atlantis is actually an ancient Cybertronian space ship, part of an initiative to colonize worlds beyond Cybertron and connect civilized planets with a network of space bridges. It suffered a computer crash and sank into Earth's ocean - with one of the plot coupons on board. The Autobots track it down in the present day and reactivate it (it's in good condition thanks to the self-repair systems). It's seemingly destroyed in the battle for the Omega Lock, but turns out to be still around, albeit damaged, twenty-odd episodes later, and plays a role in the show from then on.
 * Raideen originates with the Mu.
 * As does is Spiritual Successor RahXephon.
 * The Mysterious Cities of Gold features both Atlantis and Mu in the backstory.
 * Genesis of Aquarion: Atlantis was not the stereotype depicted in the trope. Everyone in the modern day, 12,000 years after the prologue, are fully aware of Atlantis's existence. It's called Atlantia, not Atlantis, too. It was the home of the highly evolved Shadow Angels, who treated humanity like cattle to be harvested and have their life energies fed off of. They were sealed away after humanity won the initial war.
 * One episode of the Pokémon was about Ash Ketchum and the gang coming upon an ancient underwater city called Pokelantis, which was said to have been sunk by the Legendary Pokemon Ho-oh to dispose of its evil king. Unfortunately, the evil King of Pokelantis's ghost decides to possess Ash...

Comic Books

 * Undersea home of superstrong, water-breathing mutated humans in both the DC Comics (Aquaman) and Marvel Comics (Sub-Mariner) universes.
 * Lemuria also exists in the MU. Its people are green skinned as opposed to the Atlanteans, who are blue.
 * In the Blake and Mortimer book Atlantis Mystery, a passage to Atlantis exists in a network of caves in the Azores archipelago. The Azores are an often cited place for Atlantis' location, usually coupled with the theory that the archipelago itself is an Atlantean mountain range that remained above water after the continent sank.

Fanfic

 * "Al Hanthis" from the Deva Series is said to be a civilisation whose out-of-control artificial magecraft threatened Earth before the founders of the Circles destroyed it, with marked similarities to the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha-canonical Al Hazred. Eventually,

Film
"Walter: Everyone else said, "use the North Pole", and I said, "no, too cold". Sinking never occurred to me."
 * The 90's Gamera movies had Gamera and the Gyaos originally being Atlantean creations, with the clash between them resulting in Atlantis' destruction.
 * In 10,000 B.C., the slaves say that The God of the Pyramid came from an across the sea when his homeland sank beneath the waves.
 * Others say he's from space.
 * Called Hy Brasil in Erik the Viking, but is clearly supposed to be Atlantis, even down to the Greek-stylings of the culture.
 * The name, however, comes from another mythical island.
 * As one might expect, Atlantis also features in MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis.
 * Also fairly predictable is its appearance in Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
 * Added to the 1959 version of Journey to the Center of the Earth. It's nothing more than ruins at the bottom of a volcano shaft.
 * The film Atragon features Mulian enemies and their Kaiju Manda.
 * Featured as part of the Backstory of Mystery Science Theater 3000 Classic The Final Sacrifice.
 * A similar story, but the city was in Canada.
 * In Cocoon, Atlantis was the site of the Antareans' first base here on Earth.


 * Escape From Atlantis, a 1997 film in which an American family winds up in Atlantis after being teleported to another dimension by the Bermuda Triangle.

Literature

 * JRR Tolkien's legendarium has the island of Numenor, west of Middle-earth in The Silmarillion. Its last king came to Middle-earth as a conqueror, captured Sauron and took him home as a prisoner. Sauron being Sauron, it wasn't long before nearly everyone was worshipping Darkness and Sauron himself was High Priest. He even got the king to launch an invasion of the Undying Lands, at which point God intervened and not only sank Numenor, but changed the Earth from flat-earth to a globe. In case anyone missed the point, the epilogue has the survivors call their lost home Atalante, the Downfallen.
 * Tolkien's notes state that the Atalante bit was purely coincidental. Prof. Tolkien wondered what Numenor would be in a certain in-universe language and got "Atalante". He was actually annoyed with this, since he knew people would assume he was implying this was the origin of the name Atlantis, when as a linguist he knew language change doesn't work that way.
 * Though originally, Tolkien was planning on writing a book called The Notion Club Papers, where one character dreams of Númenor and its downfall. While the name wasn't meant to be related to Atlantis, the idea was.
 * Incidentally, the Numenoreans then founded Gondor, which Tolkien admitted took quite a few cues from Ancient Egypt. Coincidence?
 * The Illuminatus! Trilogy has Atlantis as the birthplace of The Illuminati, at least according to one of the anti-Illuminati fronts in the novel.
 * "The age when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities" is part of the Backstory of the Conan the Barbarian stories. Kull, another Robert E. Howard character, was an Atlantean warlord. In the official timeline, the first civiliazations started in Europe around 40,000 B.C., when the continent was known as Thuria, The greatest nation in Thuria was Valusia. the Thurian age ended in about ten thousand years, and Conan many centureis after Thuria's doom, during the Hyborean age, which also saw the collapse of all civilization.
 * In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the Angel Islington used to be the guardian angel of Atlantis until it sank. Islington serves the main characters Atlantean wine saved from its destruction.
 * The fall of Atlantis figures prominently in Sherrilyn Kenyons Dark Hunter series, as the Atlantean goddess Appollymi The Destroyer nearly wipes the greek pantheon while Atlantis is destroyed.
 * Greg Donegan (pen name of Bob Mayer) wrote a series of books featuring Atlantis' ancient enemy returning.
 * Andre Norton's SF novel Operation Time Search. In the distant past, both Atlantis and the island of Mu were sunk beneath the surface due to the Atlanteans' misdeeds. At the end of the book, the intervention of a time-traveler from the future (our present) prevents the sinkings from occurring and both islands appear in the modern world.
 * Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle combines the fall of Atlantis, the Roman withdrawal from Britain, and Arthurian legend (heavily drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain) into one giant advertisement for why Christianity is better than pagan religion.
 * Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon uses Atlantis as the source of the old pre-Christian British religion, or at least the lore of the priestesses and bards.
 * And her Web of Darkness and Web of Light are set in Atlantis itself.
 * Ancestors of Avalon by Diana L Paxson bridges the gap between the novels set on Atlantis and the Avalon series, making a connection previosuly only hinted at.
 * Parodied somewhat in Terry Pratchett's Jingo: Klatch and Ankh-Morpork go to war over an island that rises from the sea. It had sunk a thousand years ago or thereabouts, though.
 * While he did make some references to Atlantis and the Cthulhu mythos, it was also based partly on a real event.
 * In C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, the eponymous magician (Uncle Andrew) uses a relic—interplanar dust—handed down from ancient Atlantis to craft the green and yellow rings that lead to/from the Wood Between The Worlds.
 * Or so Uncle Andrew theorizes, but the dust is in fact not from Atlantis, it's from the Wood. He doesn't find this out until Digory and Polly test the rings and come back to report what they found.
 * In the first Lensman book Triplanetary, Atlantis has jet aircraft and nuclear weapons which, along with the machinations of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, leads to its demise.
 * The Takers, a modern Two Fisted Tale by Jerry Ahern. The Gladstone Log is the MacGuffin which sends the protagonists off on their adventure. It's the log of a privately-funded 19th Century expedition to seek Atlantis, set up by British Prime Minister William Gladstone. The villain (who came across several translated pages in WW 2) has spent decades searching for it, in the belief that the 'Atlantis' described is an alien base whose technology will give him vast power.
 * Dragonlance has Istar, a powerful empire whose Kingpriest grew to believe he, himself, was on par with the gods. When he communed with them to ask to join them, they destroyed his city by throwing a "fiery mountain" at it, which caused the Cataclysm that altered the surface of the entire world.
 * Subverted in The Diamond Age, where most of the characters call themselves Atlanteans... but in that case, it just means "people from the trans-Atlantic nation culture civilization tribe."
 * The Atlantis in Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis is the world before the Vietnam War.
 * R'lyeh from the Cthulhu Mythos would be the insane, abusive cousin to Atlantis; built with Alien Geometries by terrible monsters from beyond the stars, who ruled the world long before the tiny scurrying creatures that would become men some day even existed. It sank long ago, entombing its master Cthulhu under the ocean. This keeps him in a state of sleeping undeath until The Stars Are Right for him to rise again, destroying our pitiful existence and ending the age of man. Not out of malice; he probably wouldn't notice us, much less realize that his rising had wiped mankind from the Earth.
 * In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo shows Professor Aronnax the ruins of Atlantis.
 * In Aleksandr Zarevin's Lonely Gods of the Universe, Atlantis is an island originally populated by primitive humans. Then a dozen Human Aliens from a faraway world arrive and use their advanced (20th century level) technology to pass themselves off as gods. Their males spread their seed among the local women, creating various hair colors (all humans used to have black hair). The "gods" threw regular orgies to keep themselves busy and helped the natives build up a navy to raid settlements along the Mediterranean. Then a comet came and caused a giant tidal wave. About half of the "gods" survived and are still alive (they're immortal). Then time travel gets involved, and things get really confusing.
 * The Isaac Asimov short story "Shah Guido G" features a flying city named Atlantis that rules the world with an iron fist and female soldiers called Waves as part of the setup for a lame pun.
 * Atlantis shows up in Everworld, surviving on the bottom of the ocean via protection by a dome. It should be noted that in the Crapsack World the series takes place in, Atlantis is one of the few bright spots, seeing as how it's run democratically by a man from the Real World.
 * According to Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, the lost continents of Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria and so on actually exist in different planes of existence, and that stories about them sinking into the ocean arose because the rare person from one would be able to ever perceive another plane of existence, and only "maybe a few times in his life" (according to Clarence Yojimbo).
 * In the Oera Linda Book Atlantis is called Atland. It is implied Noah's flood sank it.
 * The Submerged World in Chronicles of the Emerged World is an underwater nation inhabitated by sea-humans and merfolks alike. Eventually after the second book they're persuaded to join the war against The Tyrant.
 * In David Gemmell's Stones of Power novels, the Stones had their origin in Atlantis, and several Atlanteans appear as characters (even though the earliest of the novels is set centuries after Atlantis' fall—one of the powers the Stones enable is Time Travel).
 * Queen La from the Tarzan novels is supposed to be from Atlantis. Also, the Disney version of her for some reason portrayed La with dark skin and white hair.
 * Probably an Early-Bird Cameo - Atlantis the Lost Empire was made soon after, filled with dark skinned white haired people.
 * In Dinotopia, the lost city of Poseidos is implied to be Atlantis. Like the Disney film, it is an Advanced Ancient Acropolis which made liberal use of Power Crystals.
 * The Isles of Syren in Septimus Heap are described to be the leftover of a sunk land.
 * Atlantis was the original Earth base of the Airlia in the Area 51 novels.

Live Action TV

 * Stargate Atlantis, notable here in that it was NOT destroyed in prehistory. It just left the galaxy. The city is actually a cityship (as in starship). The city is capable of landing/floating in an ocean, as well as submerging unharmed, thus playing off the "sunken city" myth.
 * In Doctor Who continuity, ancient Atlantis is seen to be under attack by Kronos in The Time Monster, while Azal implies that he destroyed it in The Daemons. The second Doctor visits the last remanants of that civilization living underground in the 60s in The Underwater Menace. There is a persistent fan myth that there are three different explanations for how Atlantis was destroyed, but only The Daemons and The Time Monster really conflict with each other.
 * The Expanded Universe explains this as destroying bits of Atlantis, (the city, the under city and the island) one after the other.
 * Hercules: The Legendary Journeys has had at least one episode dealing with the Atlantis myth.
 * The Mystery Science Theater 3000 experiment: Alien from LA featured Kathy Ireland falling down a hole in the Middle East and discovering the lost civilization of Atlantis—now a tribe of cave-dwelling Australians who use Steampunk technology and live under the rule of an oppressive "1984"-esque government. Really.
 * "Can't she believe how bloody Australian I am??"
 * Another Mystery Science Theater 3000 experiment: Hercules and the Captive Women had the title character (Hercules, that is, not the Captive Women) stumbling upon the Island of Atlantis and attracting the attention of its vampish queen. Hercules manages to resist her charms and destroy the Island before the Atlanteans can enact their plan to Take Over the World.
 * An example of the aquatic variant, the 70s short-lived series Man from Atlantis stars Patrick Duffy as an Atlantean who fights crime using his swimming and water-breathing abilities. No kidding.
 * Lissard, a greenskinned, scaled, fish eating humanoid and a henchman of Lord Fear in Knightmare is from Atlantis.
 * The back story of Star Trek features Atlantis, a artifical landmass in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean created by the Federation. It did not sink.
 * SeaQuest DSV discovered evidence of Atlantis, of course.
 * The Power Rangers visit the sunken island of Atlantis in the fifteenth season, Operation Overdrive, on their quest for the five jewels of the Corona Aurora, the crown of the gods. To protect the valuable historical site, the Rangers' mentor decides to keep the city's location secret. The actual location of the city, whether it's in the Mediterranean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean, isn't revealed to the viewer, either.
 * The team in Danger 5 travel to Atlantis to deliver uranium to power a Humongous Mecha for the fight against Hitler.

Music

 * Lament for Atlantis by Mike Oldfield.
 * "Atlantis" (instrumental) by The Shadows.
 * Atlantis suite by Earth and Fire, from the album Atlantis.
 * Sentinel suite by Pallas from the album The Sentinel.
 * Seqelized 25 27 years later by Pallas's album XXV.
 * Atlantis by Donovan.
 * Voyage to Atlantis by the Isley Brothers.
 * Crowning of Atlantis by Therion.
 * Atrocity's entire Atlantis Concept Album.
 * The band Visions of Atlantis.
 * Stratovarius titled one of their instrumental tracks Atlantis
 * Dark Fate of Atlantis by Luca Turilli (of Rhapsody of Fire fame)

Myth and Legend

 * Obviously, the legend of the lost city of Atlantis from Greek mythology. The story goes that the citizens of Atlantis weren't paying tribute to the gods. As punishment, the gods sunk the island to the bottom of the ocean, thus giving us the Family-Unfriendly Aesop of "respect the gods, or you and your entire city will drown!"
 * It should be noted that there were no stories, in Greece anyway, of anything like Atlantis until Plato's allegorical account. It seems he made it up whole-cloth.
 * Not entirely. Plato probably based his account on the destruction of the Greek city of Helike (a.k.a., Elike) by an earthquake and tsunami in 373 B.C. and from the volcanic eruption of Thera on the island of Santorini around 1600 B.C. which all but wiped out the Minoan civilization on Crete.
 * Readers should also note that Plato's Atlantis and its fate are very briefly described, with very few details outside of its unusual structure of concentric rings of land and water. Almost everything anything thinks they know about Atlantis other than that it sunk is [[Word of Dante|encrustations by later writers, including its promotion from city to island to entire freakin' continent.
 * In Celtic Mythology there's Ys which is the famous drowned city off the coast of Brittany, the Welsh kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod which met a similar fate, the sunken Cornish kingdom of Lyonesse, and even Avalon which, in some versions of the legend, also sank into the sea. (Actually, this one's damn-near archetypal by now. You'll find submerged cities everywhere you can throw a stone, these days.)
 * Russian myth and legend has Kitezh which God saved from conquest by the Mongols by having it sink into Svetloyar Lake.
 * Vineta, a mediaeval city somewhere along the coast of the Baltic Sea, and allegedly with a fate similar to Atlantis. Not much is known about Vineta, and therefore also not much concerning how big the grain of truth in the Vineta legend is.

Tabletop Games

 * Mage: The Awakening posits Atlantis as the origin point for magical knowledge. It wasn't the only place where magic took place (various "barbarian" cultures had their own mages), but it was a major center of magical progress. It also bears the "hubris" connotations as Atlantis fell when a bunch of mages tried to ascend to the heavens then kicked the ladder down after them—which also made magic a lot harder to use for everyone else. Of course, the questions of where and when all this happened are pretty much unsolvable due to the sheer affront to reality that occurred when the Ladder fell.
 * The Old World of Darkness was deliberately vague on Atlantis. The sourcebook Blood-Dimmed Tides gives ideas of what Atlantis could be/might have been, but leaves it up to the storyteller to decide whether to incorporate the city or if it existed at all.
 * Rifts had a highly-advanced human kingdom on the continent, which disappeared with a powerful ritual that also took most of the magic away from the Earth. The Atlanteans themselves scattered, then the continent returned in a World Sundering event that destroyed civilization. It was subsequently taken over by a monster and his armies, who basically sees it as his own personal Las Vegas (for evil monsters).
 * Ulthuan, home of the High Elves in Warhammer Fantasy Battle, is basically the Fantasy Counterpart Culture for Atlantis.
 * It didn't sink but it came close.
 * Early mentions of the nation of Alphatia, from the Dungeons & Dragons setting of Mystara, hinted that it was actually Atlantis. As Mystara's history was expanded upon in later game products, this connection was downplayed,.
 * In Unknown Armies, Atlantis is discussed. The Global section of the book reveals
 * Though this is probably just a rumour. Other books suggest
 * Pre-sinking Atlantis gets a full Fantasy Hero sourcebook from Hero Games. Post-sinking Atlantis appears in the Hidden Lands sourcebook for Champions.
 * Magic: The Gathering has Lord of Atlantis, the first merfolk lord printed. This was later retconned-Atlantis is now a merfolk colony called Etlan Shiis; "Atlantis" is the corrupted pronunciation used by the the (human) Orvadians they traded with.
 * The 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons book 'Stormwrack' introduces a new player race in the Aventi, who hail from the sunken city of Aventus.
 * Pathfinder has the sunken continent of Azlant, complete with Sub-Mariner-looking "gillmen."
 * Dozens of lost lands from folklore, including Atlantis, featured in Bard Games' three-volume RPG series The Arcanum, The Lexicon, and The Bestiary.
 * Exalted features Luthe, a city of shining oricalchum that floated on the Western seas until it was sunk during the Usurpation by its Solar queen, who would not let the enemy take it. Thing is, the city's still occupied; not all the Dragon-Blooded soldiers, nor the city's inhabitants, got off before it was sunk, and Leviathan (a Lunar caught in a love triangle between the Solar queen and her husband) has spent millennia angsting over his failure and keeping the inhabitants and their descendants there. He's now worshipped as a whale god amongst them.
 * Part of the Backstory of the true Immortals from Witchcraft.
 * Scion has Atlantis as being under Antartica, though it was once further up in the Atlantic Ocean where Plato put it. It's people had their own gods, provided in the Demigod book and the Scion Companion for those who want to change canon, but as it stands the Atlanteans took to worshipping the Titans. The Atlantean gods got killed/imprisoned/something and all the other gods in the world descended on Atlantis, so very angry that they not only sank it and killed every single Atlantean but ended up shifting it to the South Pole, more or less by accident. An object lesson in avoiding making enemies of dozens of pantheons worth of petty, vengeful deities.

Video Games

 * Astro Boy Omega Factor for the GBA features Mu as a whole level, however it's pretty intricate to the game's entire plot.
 * One of the levels in Cruis'n Exotica takes place in Atlantis. Yes, the cars are racing underwater.
 * Also, one of the levels in the "Tempest Pack" DLC for Hydro Thunder Hurricane is set in Atlantis as well. And yes, the boats are underwater, too.
 * Reversed in Age of Mythology, where Atlantis is still a completely normal island not far away from Portugal.
 * Which is a possible reference to the Azores theory mentioned above.
 * In Chrono Cross,
 * In Chrono Trigger,
 * Ecco the Dolphin visits Atlantis during his journey. In this iteration, Atlantis was at war with aliens stealing lifeforms from Earth to snack on, and the island was sunk by a beam from said aliens. Luckily the Atlanteans were masters of time travel and escaped into the past.
 * In Final Fantasy VIII, the Centra civilization fits this trope. Being the parent civilization of most of the current civilizations in the game's story, it was obliterated 100 years before in a single event by a cataclysmic natural disaster called the Lunar Cry. This would normally be Death From Above, but the presence and activation of the Crystal Pillar in Centra at the time caused the Lunar Cry to specifically target Centra dead-on with Kill Sat effects.
 * In Golden Sun, you and your party visit their world's version of Lemuria, which has sunk into ruin.
 * Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, as if it wasn't obvious. The game also references Hermocrates, which would have been the third dialogue in Plato's trilogy if it had been written.
 * The plot of the first Tomb Raider game revolves around the search for a lost Atlantean superweapon.
 * In Xenogears, the Zeboim civilization exists as Underwater Ruins beneath the Aquvy region. It was annihilated 6000 years prior by global nuclear war that wiped out most of the planet's population.
 * Lemuria in Ever 17. It's never revealed as to whether it ever really existed or not, but it's implied that it didn't. It's mostly used to tie into the plot of possible psychic powers, time travel and divine wrath, some of which are real and some are not. Maybe.
 * Unreal Tournament 2004 has a Double Domination map, that takes place in Atlantis. The map is called DOM-Atlantis. Still under the sea, but all that water is kept out of the arena by Atlantean magic.
 * The Journeyman Project 3 has Atlantis as one of the three time periods visited during the game. The city is unusually realistic and well-researched in this game (apart from the Alien Technology), with the developers going out of the way to show their work through comments made by Arthur your AI sidekick.
 * In essence, thanks to advanced technology left behind by helpful Precursors, Atlantis was a theocratic city-state built on a Mediterranean island, with dikes opening up usable land. They were isolationist and rather elitist, enslaving any who found the city. It's destruction was due to a battle between two alien races after the Lost Technology.
 * ''World of Warcraft has the undersea city of Nazjatar - capital of the ancient Night Elf civilization before its sinking, now home to the nagas that the Highborne Night Elves were mutated into.
 * Skies of Arcadia has Soltis. Which was sunk by its creators.
 * And was named Atlantia in the Japanese Version.
 * Atlantis is the primary setting for the Expansion Pack Poseidon - Master of Atlantis. It doesn't take itself all too seriously.
 * Atlantis was going to appear in God of War 2, but was Dummied Out.
 * Referenced in 3 in the battle with Poseidon, who claims that; "Atlantis will be avenged!" hinting that Kratos had a hand in the city's destruction, which is hardly surprising.
 * Kratos travels to Atlantis in Ghost Of Sparta.
 * In Timelapse, Atlantis is the last world you can visit. It's quite beautiful, contains technology from Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and it's nearly empty—the Atlanteans left for another planet. Watch out for the one remaining inhabitant, though.
 * In the world of Dystopia, Atlantis is an aquatic city with no definite location in the Atlantic Ocean. One would think that the Space Elevator attached to this free floating city would make it easy to find, but poor weather is common and the city tends to move often. It nearly sank during a terrorist attack.
 * You visit several Atlantis-like places in Aquaria, although in this case, none of them sank; they were underwater already, home to an assortment of aquatic sentients (all of them humanoid, to a greater or lesser degree). Naija is.
 * There is one, in fact; it's never given a name (only referred to as "The Sunken City"), but it's familiar to your partner, and may be . Unlike the other ruins you encounter, which have the appearance of being designed to take advantage of being constructed in underwater caves, the buildings in The Sunken City have the look of being terran in origin.
 * Shows up in the game Banjo Tooie.
 * Mu and other lost islands are mentioned in Terranigma. They are only present in the game if the player "revives" them by visiting secret towers in the beginning of the game. They don't contain much, just a free inn and a nice weapon.
 * The titular land of Ys and other lost civilizations in the series. The former is apparently inspired by the Celtic legend of the city of Ys, although it's a Floating Continent rather than a sunken city. The sixth game does have one of those, though.
 * In Dominions 3, there's an Atlantis. It's a civilization composed of frog-people and fish-people from coral reefs and deep sea trenches, and it's not especially advanced in either magic or technology (though its basalt enchantments are nothing to scoff at). It doesn't sink, but it's destroyed twice, and the survivors of the Second Fall become Inuit-esque death mages.

Webcomics

 * In Wapsi Square, the ancient civilization known as Lanthis was the source of the Atlantis stories. Ultimately, their attempt to make a very powerful weapon resulted in a Class II end of the world scenario.
 * In Dustpit Follies, it turns out that Atlantis sunk because aliens attacked. The city was of the "technology more advanced than modern day" varient. One of the characters has a harddrive that apparently survived the destuction and thousands of years. He bought it from a flea market for 10 bucks.
 * Shelley, Amy and Desmond visit Atlantis in one of the last chapters of Scary Go Round.
 * Mega Man 6 had Centaur Man's stage be modeled after Atlantis, due to the fact that Greece was (allegedly?) near Atlantis.
 * Rapture from BioShock (series) was meant to be a new-age, art-deco, Objectivist Atlantis. Not that it really worked out, other than the art-deco thing.

Western Animation

 * Cosmo of The Fairly OddParents takes this to absurd lengths when it's revealed that he sunk Atlantis...9 times. This is even Lampshaded when a character stops and asks "How?"
 * Disney's Atlantis the Lost Empire.
 * Parodied in an episode of Futurama, "The Deep South", where the Planet Express crew stumbles upon the lost city of Atlanta, GA. It comes complete with a parody of the Atlantis song quoted above, sung by Donovan himself.
 * In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003 (2003), Atlantis—or, as it's called by the natives, Y'lyntis—was at the center of several of the series' subplots, including the origin of the turtles' second lair.
 * The underwater city of Atlantis also showed up in an episode of the original cartoon. Oddly, one of its inhabitants was a Fish Person, while the rest were human (a dome kept out the water).
 * Another version of Atlantis exists in ancient Greece in the original series. This one has the followers of Atlantis make April wear the amulet that makes her queen and resurrect Atlantis from the sea.
 * The DuckTales (1987) episode "Aqua Ducks" was largely set in Atlantis.
 * There's also a Carl Barks story set there.
 * In DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, the Genie said that Merlock wished to sink Atlantis because he couldn't get resort reservations.
 * In Ruby Gloom, Misery's disaster-plagued lineage apparently starts at Atlantis, where Misery the First had a summer home. Inexplicably, she has slides.
 * Atlantis is where most of the movie In Search of the Titanic takes place. This animation is a sequel to The Legend Of The Titanic which is loosely based on Titanic disaster.
 * Parodied in Heathcliff and The Catillac Cats with "In Search of Catlantis".
 * Centurions featured four episodes partially set there.
 * The Godzilla Power Hour featured an episode about Atlantis with a rampaging robot being responsible for the sinking.
 * Jackie Chan Adventures: Atlantis used to be the centre of water demon Bai Tsa's empire. When she's set free in season two, she heads straight for it only to find it in ruins due to the intervening centuries.
 * Atlantis shows up in several SpongeBob SquarePants episodes, but is most prominent in "Atlantis Squarepantis". (A throwaway line in that story reveals that its Atlanteans came from another planet.)
 * Phineas and Ferb decided to find and raise Atlantis one day.
 * In Xiaolin Showdown, Master Fung mentions that Dojo (when he was having one of his "evil" days) sunk Atlantis.
 * The group actually visits Atlantis in a later episode, a deserted ruin with a big "Welcome to Atlantis" sign outside. Dojo wistfully remarks that "you should've seen this place a few thousand years ago."
 * In Mighty Max both Skullmaster and Virgil come from Lemuria. It is unclear whether this is the same place as the undersea city that Skullmater destroyed in order to trick the populace to give him their souls for "safe keeping".
 * Visited by the title character of Alfred J Kwak, and it's inhabited by Dodos, long thought extinct after a massive flood.

Other

 * Plato described Atlantis as "beyond the Pillars of Hercules (read: Gibraltar)" and "as big as Libya and Asia (read: Asia Minor, i.e. Turkey, and the part of Africa north of the Sahara) combined", home to a great civilization wiped out by natural disaster. For centuries after the discovery of the New World, certain mapmakers insisted on identifying the Americas with Atlantis.
 * There is a luxury hotel just outside Nassau in the Bahamas calling itself Atlantis. This is not worthy of note until one considers that Atlantis' fall was due to certain moral extravagances often associated with having too much money, and the delicious irony therein.
 * Even more so considering it is in a hurricane zone and near to an earthquake zone, so "sinking" is possible, if remote.
 * The Yonaguni Monument: A large, regularly-shaped formation off the coast of Japan's southernmost island. Some say that it was naturally formed due to it's sandstone breaking due to seismic activity. Others believe that it could be the remains of some lost civilization's city or temple, and estimates state that it could date back to 8,000 BC, around the end of the last ice age. If the latter were true, then history as we know it would change drastically, since that would make the monument older than the Pyramids, and it would mean that Atlantis is the result of some sort of ancient legend of a real civilization there was a real civilization whose fate was similar to that of the legendary Atlantis.
 * In the late 19th and early 20th century, before modern theories of plate tectonics became predominant, "lost continents" featured prominently in scientific speculation. For the most part the ideas that land masses rise or sink into the ocean was used as a means of explaining relatively mundane phenomena, like the presence of Lemurs in both Madagascar and India despite the thousands of miles of ocean and desert that stands between them. Naturally anthropologists and linguists also jumped on board to explain human migration and so forth. Eventually people started to take the idea to its logical conclusion and suggested that whole, and potentially advanced civilizations might have once existed on these continents, and like so many other myths before the legend of Atlantis contained a kernel of truth to it. This idea was hugely popular in the early part of the 20th century, not just with crackpot mystics but with the population at large. It all just seemed so perfectly logical, at least compared to the alternative theory: that landmasses are all floating on a giant subterranean ocean of molten rock. It was really more a case of people taking advantage of the ambiguity to indulge in the most fanciful explanation.
 * This has led to some ideas of Atlantis using Lemuria as an alternative name, or sometimes as another sunken continent that sank around the same time. An updated version is that the landmass below the ice in Antartica was the original Atlantis (an idea the first Aliens Vs. Predator movie ran with).
 * Some people still believe that lost continents with advanced civilizations once existed. Unlike people in the 19th century, however, they are pretty unequivocally ridiculous. This is especially true with the people that combine the idea with new age concepts and Ancient Astronauts, like Michael Tsarion. This borders on terminal stupidity with people who attribute the condemnation of their beliefs to some sort of nefarious scheming within the scientific community. They're called "Alternate Historians" and you should avoid them like the plague.
 * These are not to be confused with Alternate History authors.
 * There is a strong belief among the people of Cornwall and Scilly that there is a sunken land under the sea that serves as their border known as Lyonesse. Apparantly, if you stand on the cliffs of southernmost Cornwall, you can still hear the churchbells ring under the waves...
 * The same story is also told about the city of Ys off the coast of Brittany.
 * Both of which are, in part, true. Sea levels at one point where a lot lower meaning the English Channel and all it's surrounding islands where a lot bigger. The isles of Scilly (for example) was one big island and there are traces of farm hedges underneath the waves.
 * Changing sea levels and plate tectonics have caused low-lying areas of today's continents to spend long periods submerged. Presumably this will happen to such regions again, but only on a geological time scale.
 * For a long time, Russians believed in a place called Zemlya Sannikova Sannikov Land, said to be an island far north in the Arctic Ocean. Several explorers claimed to have seen it as they sailed through the polar sea, and Baron Eduard von Toll vanished on his 1902 search for it. There may have indeed been a Sannikov Land at one time, in which case it was submerged. It was also believed that a volcano made the island warm, and allowed a tribe called the Onkilon to live there. These legends formed the basis for the story Sannikov Land, adapted into a 1973 film.