Tasmania, Texas or Tipperary? Expert Google Maps players can tell at a glimpse

An unremarkable stretch of highway and trees, as seen on Google Maps’ Street View, appears on the screen. It could be anywhere from Tasmania to Texas. “This is going to be south Philippines, somewhere on this road down here,” Trevor Rainbolt says instantly, clicking on a location on a map of the world that is less than 20km from the spot.

A road winding through woods is up next. Lake Tahoe? Siberia? “It looks like we’re going to be in Switzerland here, unless we’re in Japan. Yeah, we have to be in Japan here,” Rainbolt says, correctly pinpointing the country.

Rainbolt has become the face of a fast-growing community of geography fanatics who play a game called GeoGuessr. The premise is simple: as you stare at a computer or phone, you are plopped down somewhere in the world in Google Street View and must guess, as quickly as you can, exactly where you are. You can click to travel down roads and through cities, scanning for distinguishable landmarks or language. The closer you guess, the more points you score.

To some, Rainbolt’s snap answers seem like wizardry. To him, they are simply the result of countless hours of practice and an insatiable thirst for geographic knowledge. “I don’t think I’m some genius,” says Rainbolt, a 23-year-old online-video producer in Los Angeles. “It’s like a magician. To the magician the trick is easy, but to everyone else it’s a lot harder.”

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For the casual player, traversing still images of winding pastoral roads, Mediterranean foothills and streets filled with tuk-tuks can be tranquil, especially without a time limit. But for performers like Rainbolt, the pace is frenetic, and identifying a location can take seconds — or less.

Rainbolt is not the top GeoGuessr player in the world. That distinction is often considered to belong to a Dutch teenager who goes by GeoStique, or to a French player known as Blinky. But since around the start of this year Rainbolt has been the standard-bearer for GeoGuessr, thanks to his captivating social-media posts, shared with his 820,000 followers on TikTok as well as on other social platforms.

Appearing in a hoodie and sometimes headphones as dramatic classical music plays in the background, Rainbolt identifies countries after what appears to be simply a glance at the sky or a patch of trees. In some videos he guesses the correct locale after looking at a Street View image for a tenth of a second, or in black and white, or pixelated — or all of the above. In others, he is blindfolded and guesses (correctly) off a description someone else provides him.

The videos that have generated the most shock are ones in which Rainbolt, using his topographical sleuthing, identifies exactly where music videos were filmed. In one viral clip, he found the exact street in Nevada from a video of a person driving with a capybara. “If I ever go missing, I hope someone hires this guy on my behalf,” one Twitter user commented.

GeoGuessr was created in 2013 by a Swedish software engineer, Anton Wallén, who came up with the idea while on a trek across the United States. Early influencers like GeoWizard, a British YouTuber, helped promote the game. It also gained popularity during the pandemic, when it introduced a multiplayer mode called Battle Royale. Rainbolt’s social-media posts boosted it further. Last month, in a publicity coup, Rainbolt live-streamed with Ludwig Ahgren, a former Twitch personality who now broadcasts to three million followers on YouTube.

The GeoGuessr site has 40 million accounts, says Filip Antell, who leads content for GeoGuessr, a 25-person company in Stockholm. Some of those people are subscribers who chip in $1.99 a month for the ability to play an unlimited number of games. The revenue, Antell says, goes toward paying developers and Google, which charges GeoGuessr for the use of its software.

Despite his globe-spanning knowledge, Rainbolt, who grew up in Arkansas, has never left North America. But he has plenty of places on his bucket list, including Laos and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. People tell Rainbolt that his passion is somewhat crazy. The most common question his friends ask him is: “Is it real?” He says it is, and promises he has never faked a video. He does get countries wrong, sometimes. Mistaking the United States for Canada, or the Czech Republic for Slovakia, are two common slip-ups for even the greatest players. And he acknowledges that he was mostly posting his highlights on social media, not the occasional fumble.

So how does he do it?

The key, of course, is practice. Rainbolt fell down the GeoGuessr rabbit hole during the pandemic, watching others live-stream their play and pouring through study guides assembled by geography lovers. He says he spent four to five hours each day studying: playing GeoGuessr in specific countries repeatedly to get a feel for the terrain and memorising how landmarks like road markers and telephone poles differ by country. “Candidly, I haven’t had any social life for the past year,” he says. “But it’s worth it, because it’s so fun and I enjoy learning.”

Some of the top features that Rainbolt uses to distinguish one country from another, he says, are bollards, the posts used as barriers on the sides of roads; telephone poles; number plates; which side of the road the cars are driving on; and soil colour. There are other clues, if you know where to look. The quality of the image matters — Google filmed different countries using different generations of camera — as does the colour of the car being used to record the terrain. A glimpse of a white car in South America, for instance, means you are in Peru, Bolivia or Chile, Rainbolt says.

Once, when Mills was playing GeoGuessr with her father, she immediately identified an image as being in Uruguay, because of lines on a road. His reaction, she says, was “How the hell do you know that?”

Professional GeoGuessr players — so described because they are the best in the world, not because they earn a living doing it — say the competitive scene is still nascent but growing rapidly.

Leon Cornale, a 21-year-old pro player known as Kodiak, from Germany, describes competitive GeoGuessr as “fragmented and divided”. A group of players in France, for instance, have formed their own community and host tournaments, while other players have formed groups through Reddit. But GeoGuessr’s recent social-media popularity has jump-started interest in broader competitions.

The best players, who are often as young as 15, vie for world records and have begun competing in tournaments organised by Rainbolt and streamed live on Twitch. There is little money to be had, but star players do earn the adulation of the thousands of more casual GeoGuessr players who gather on a Discord server to swap tips and share scores.

Lukas Zircher, a 24-year-old from Innsbruck in Austria, grew obsessed with GeoGuessr when he stumbled on one of Rainbolt’s Instagram posts. Zircher decided that he too wanted to become one of the greats of the game. “It’s tough to get good, really good,” says Zircher, whose free time is now devoted to studying bollards and memorising the colour of South African soil. “I can recognise all the African countries from a few pictures, but I’m still far from being good — I miss all the eastern European countries.”

Syd Mills, a 22-year-old freelance illustrator from New Jersey, became enthralled after watching Rainbolt’s content. She had played GeoGuessr before but was surprised at how quickly she improved after watching his videos that provide tips on identifying countries. “This time, instead of passively wandering around and desperately looking for a language hint or a flag, I would pick up on stuff like guardrails, road markings, bollards,” Mills says.

She sometimes experiences moments that she imagines are similar to the awe Rainbolt inspires. Once, when playing GeoGuessr with her father, she immediately identified an image as being in Uruguay, because of lines on a road. His reaction, she says, was “How the hell do you know that?” — This article originally appeared in The New York Times