Effective route planning is essential to the successful operation of unmanned vehicles. Video game experience has been shown to affect route planning and execution, but why video game experience helps has not been addressed. One answer may be that spatial skills, necessary for route planning and execution, improve after experience with video games. The current study examines the degree to which spatial ability, specifically spatial visualization, mediates the relationship between video game experience and route planning. Results indicated that this mediated relationship existed for the UGV operators only. Although the UAV operators’ video game experience predicted spatial ability, this did not significantly affect performance