GeoGuessr, despite first releasing way back in 2013, is a game that continues to surge in popularity thanks in part to its relatively new, highly addictive competitive game modes, but also due to the incredible traction GeoGuessr videos now get on social media.
Loveable personalities like GeoWizard on YouTube and lightning-fast guessers like georainbolt on TikTok have cultivated a community of people that love nothing more than tracking down locations on Google Maps.
That’s right, if you’re unaware of what GeoGuessr is, it’s a game that’s based entirely within Google Maps.
Your only goal? Find where you’ve been dropped into the world of Google Street View. The closer you are to guessing your location, the more points you get (or the more points you take away from your opponent).
There are various maps and modes you can play, as well as different settings to make the game easier or harder.
For example, you could allow a lot of time to guess, you could increase your health, and allow as much moving, zooming in and out, and panning, as possible.
Alternatively, you could throw yourself in at the deep end; playing a competitive map like A Diverse World whilst removing the option to move, pan or zoom. This is widely known as the hardest regular game mode ‘NPMZ’ (No Move, Pan or Zoom).
This might seem like an underwhelming advert for the game but it’s absolutely not a sponsored post – though we do wish they’d paid us for this feature – it’s just hard to do a game justice when the game at its core sounds so boring (but it’s not, and you’ve gotta see it to believe it).
People are now playing this game for thousands of dollars
On Saturday, August 20th 2022, georainbolt will be hosting the biggest professional GeoGuessr tournament of all time live on Twitch, with a $2,000 prizepool providing a healthy payday for the team that comes out victorious. Not bad for a few hours work.
This smashes the previous record for a GeoGuessr tournament, with the current record prizepool standing at $1,000. First place will be awarded $1,600 and the runner-up will receive $400.
They’ll be playing with ‘pro’ settings; no moving, no healing, and played on the competitive map ‘A Diverse World’.
And what super cool, unbelievably generous and strangely-attractive-for-PHP website provided the prizepool? Oh, stop it you, that was DiamondLobby. We had a bit of money lying around for “marketing” and thought “screw it, let’s give it all to a humble and welcoming gaming community.”
This is the latest in a string of “f*** it, why not?” financial decisions from yours truly, after paying a designer to build Call of Duty maps in LEGO software in 2021, and after giving away $1,000 earlier this year to the game completionist community in a race get Platinum on Dying Light 2.
All in the name of good fun, eh?
We want to do our best to support niche communities in the gaming world where we can afford to, and we’re hopeful that this is only going to lead to bigger and more impressive tournaments in the GeoGuessr space in the future.
The biggest ever (for the time being) GeoGuessr tournament will be running with an unforgiving single elimination bracket and will start at 11am PST (that’s 6pm UTC).
The tournament is expected to feature some of the finest brains in the game across 16 teams, including world record holders.