Meet Geoguessr – Georainbolt

 All videos by @georainbolt 

You don’t meet professional Google maps players every day. Can you tell us more about what it is and how your passion came about?

Professional Google Maps player is a loose term for anyone that competes at a high level in the game Geoguessr. For context, Geoguessr is a game where it randomly drops you anywhere within the world (that has street view) and you have to guess where you are. My passion started in June 2021 after watching multiple videos of people playing on YouTube…after spending weeks of content watching I decided to start playing. When I first started I was already decent at the game given how much gameplay I had watched. I spent really every ounce of my free time within these past 16 months dedicated to the game and learning everything I can about different countries. 

You define yourself as a player, but don’t you think that this skill of yours can also be useful for some work-related implications?

There’s definitely some overlap from the game and the world itself. I started a geolocation series where I find old nostalgic photos people have with some emotional attachment or even just finding streets from random music videos or movies. The skill set I’ve picked up through the game has given me an extreme advantage in cases like this. Other than geolocation, I don’t think much is translatable to the “real world” other than things like training visual memory or pattern recognition.

Tell us about your most difficult mission.

There are a couple. Myself and other pros have spent collectively 100+ hours trying to find a street from the viral “Scary Car Commercial” video from like 2004 and we still can’t find it. An in game challenge that is always difficult is guessing using half the image while the visible image is black and white. A lot of the game surprisingly relies on colors, so losing half your image AND the colors is extremely difficult and often struggle quite a bit there.

How long did it take you to get to the level of expertise you are at right now?

 I have spent 18 months playing the game consistently, but I would say most of my knowledge came within a 3-4 month period from January 2021 to April 2021 where I really grinded games out and improved drastically.

Will you challenge AI again on Geoguessr? How do you feel about that?

I challenged AI recently and even though AI is improving, humans are still better. For now.

We’ve seen you guess places on Mars, the Moon and even blindfolded! What else can we expect to see from you?

I always ask myself “what’s next” and “how can I top this” and there’s always something new that comes to mind to really push barriers. I would love to get better at pinpointing specific countries extremely quickly as my next big leap. (eg: finding streets in Germany in 10 seconds, etc). It’s one thing to immediately know the country…but to know the region…and maybe even the exact road is the next step.

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