Mathieu Huet, also known as Blinky, took a few moments to locate, a hundred meters away, a street in a Bulgarian town south of the border with Romania. His opponent, the American MP, thinks he mistakenly recognized northern Italy. The audience in the room rejoices, as do the commentators, when “Blinky” takes a terrible lead in this round.
The Frenchman won the World Cup on Sunday, September 15. geoguessra game of logic, geography and especially memory whose popularity has skyrocketed since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Released in 2013, geoguessrA contraction of “geo” and “guess”, it allows the player to use a tool they know very well: Google Street View. The game consists of virtually inspecting a random road, previously travelled by a Google car, with the aim of identifying the location and placing it on a world map. Road signs, intersections, landscapes, languages… All the clues are good for finding the most precise coordinates possible.
The World Cup geoguessr – commentated by, among others, Rainbolt, an American player who has become one of the faces of the game – took place in Stockholm, Sweden, from September 11 to 15, after qualifying phases in different regions of the world.
Blinky, who won 3 rounds to 2 against MK, was already well known in the community for his talent and was even the subject of memes on the Reddit discussion forum. During the previous (and first) World Cup geoguessrThe Frenchman had already reached the final. In December, the Guardian He described the young man, then 24 years old, as“invincible”.
Abundant literature
Beyond these few champions, geoguessr It mobilizes large communities of enthusiasts, who play but also write and exchange geographical guides of several hundred pages.
We learn to recognise traffic signs from around the world, the way lines are painted on roads in different countries, the position of the sun in different places, times and seasons, or simply the subtle differences between the various Swedish islands: Few online communities have produced this kind of literature.
As another French candidate recently interviewed by BFM-TV recalls, at a very high level, geoguessr It is no longer a simple exercise in geography, but also requires knowledge of how Google Street View works. Starting with the uneven mapping established by the American company, which ignores many countries.
Another example: from the French channel, the player recalls that, in Ghana, the support installed on the roof of the car to hold the camera of Google cars is adorned with an immediately recognizable black plastic ribbon.
