The world’s best gamers who can identify a location anywhere in the world after seeing an image in less than a second faced off yesterday in a world championship in Stockholm.
A picture of a sunny paved road appears on a computer screen, bordered by trees and bushes. A red dirt road crosses the paved road in what appears to be a tropical landscape.
“We’re going to be in Indonesia because of the sticker on this pole,” Trevor Rainbolt of the US tells reporters.
He clicks on the map and selects what appears to be a random location in Indonesia.
Bingo — he is just 88km from the actual spot.
Rainbolt, a fast-talking computer geek, is one of the biggest stars in the GeoGuessr game community for his uncanny ability to determine the location of a Google Maps picture in one-10th of a second.
A reporter watching him play is barely able to see the image in that amount of time, much less guess the country, city or village.
“It requires a lot of work and research,” Rainbolt said. “During the pandemic I played around 18 hours a day.”
Created by Swedish trio Anton Wallen, Daniel Antell and Erland Ranvinge, GeoGuessr was born on May 10, 2013, when it was published on a popular platform for coders.
The idea is simple: a player is dropped somewhere in the world on Google Maps’ Street View and has to guess where they are. They put the cursor on the world map and click on the location they think is correct. The closer the player is to the real spot, the more points they get.
“My friend Anton was playing around with the Application Programming Interface that Google released publicly, so he made a small game and put it on Reddit,” Antell told reporters. “Then it went viral.”
Yesterday, 24 players from around the world were competing in Stockholm in the first official world championship organized by GeoGuessr, with a US$50,000 prize pool.
The final was to be played after press time last night.
GeoGuessr has flourished into a company with sales of 200 million kronor (US$18 million), with Antell as chief executive officer, but neither the company nor the players seem too concerned about whether the game becomes an official e-sport.
It is different from other e-sports in that “it’s more accessible,” with a free and a premium version, Wallen said.
It is also frequently played by children and in schools.
The game now has 65 million registered users worldwide.
“Now we are growing most on mobile and that’s a lot more casual players,” Wallen said.
The world’s top players have a range of clues and tips they use to help them identify locations, after hours spent scrutinizing pictures online.
These can be black dots on Argentine license plates, ground markings in Greece, vegetation or the color of the soil in Africa, or even the position of the camera on Google’s vehicles, which is lower in Sri Lanka and Japan for privacy reasons.
“It’s a bit of detective work, you have to put all the puzzle pieces together to figure out where you are,” said Mattias “Macken” McCullin, who represented Sweden in the championships.
The game has made Rainbolt want to see the world in real life.
Last year, he went to Botswana.
“Would I have ever gone to Botswana before I started playing this game? Absolutely not,” he said. “I have this new-found love for these countries, that I wouldn’t have had without this game.”
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