How GeoGuessr Was Made (Anton Wallén’s Story)

How GeoGuessr was made is a story about a Swedish developer, Google’s mapping tools, and a habit that turned into a global pastime. Anton Wallén, a Swedish IT consultant, built GeoGuessr as a side project in 2013 and released it in May of that year. It spread quickly through press coverage and word of mouth. More than a decade later, GeoGuessr has tournaments, a subscription, and a streaming scene that wraps it like a sport.

Who Anton Wallén is

Anton Wallén was working as an IT consultant in Sweden when he prototyped GeoGuessr in 2013. He enjoyed visiting faraway places on Google Street View, and that habit was the spark: he first wrote a small program that dropped him at a random Street View location, then added the competitive guessing element on top.

The personal-habit-to-game pipeline is a recurring pattern in successful indie projects. Josh Wardle built Wordle for his partner, a fan of word games. Orteil built Cookie Clicker as a quick joke experiment. Wallén built GeoGuessr because he was already playing the unstructured version of it on his own time.

The Google Street View API

The technical foundation of GeoGuessr is Google’s Street View imagery, which Google opened to embedding through its Maps API in the late 2000s. By 2013, a developer could load a Street View panorama at any latitude and longitude where Google had coverage. That was the entire raw material Wallén needed.

Wallén has said the first version took about two weeks, written in JavaScript (using the Backbone.js framework) on top of the Google Maps API. The game picked a location within Street View coverage; the player saw the panorama and dropped a pin on a separate world map; the score was a function of the distance between the actual location and the player’s guess.

The launch

Wallén released GeoGuessr in May 2013 and submitted it to Google’s Chrome Experiments showcase. The format was inherently shareable — every game produced a result (a distance score, a map of guess vs. actual) that translated naturally into screenshots and stories, and press coverage followed quickly.

The early viral arc happened without paid distribution. The game’s content was, in effect, the entire world. Every location was new to most players. Every round produced a result that could be discussed afterward. That combination — universal subject, comparable scores, infinite content — is hard to engineer deliberately. Wallén got it on his first try.

The original scoring

GeoGuessr’s score falls off steeply (roughly exponentially) as the distance between guess and actual grows. In the modern game, a perfect guess earns 5,000 points and a guess a few thousand kilometers off on the world map earns only a few hundred. Five rounds per game, max 25,000 points. Simple enough to fit on a single results screen, complex enough to reward small improvements in accuracy.

The scoring is part of why competitive play emerged. A perfect 25,000-point game on the world map is rare, and the gap between average and elite players is visible in the score, which made it possible to talk meaningfully about skill levels.

The community

GeoGuessr’s competitive scene built itself in the years after launch. Players like Trevor Rainbolt, whose viral clips from 2022 onward made him almost synonymous with the format, showed that elite players can place a location from a glimpse of a road sign, a utility pole, or a patch of vegetation. Communities formed around the meta — how to read landscape clues, recognize country-specific road markings and bollards, and spot which camera generation captured the imagery.

The depth of the meta is what kept the game alive past its initial viral spike. A casual player can have fun guessing continents. An expert player can often identify the country from the road surface or a sliver of the Google camera car visible in the panorama. The skill ceiling is effectively infinite because the source material is the entire planet’s road network.

The subscription model

A paid PRO membership existed by the mid-2010s, unlocking extras such as multiplayer and themed maps. In 2019, Wallén announced that non-paying players would get a more limited version, citing the rising cost of keeping the site running, and the free timed mode was discontinued in February 2024. Each step was controversial among free players, but subscriptions funded the platform’s transformation into a competitive game with prize tournaments.

Along the way, GeoGuessr transitioned from “Wallén’s solo side project” to “a company with employees and infrastructure obligations.” Today it is run by a Stockholm-based company with a full team behind the platform, far beyond one developer’s spare-time project.

Why it works

GeoGuessr’s longevity comes from a near-perfect fit between source material and mechanic. The Street View library is enormous and keeps growing. The guessing mechanic is universally legible. The scoring rewards both knowledge and intuition. There’s no narrative dependency that can age; there’s no balance problem because the world is the balance. Duels and other modes have been added, but the core loop in 2026 is the same as in 2013, with more polish.

The lessons for other web games are limited because GeoGuessr’s source material is unique — few other formats can draw on a photographic record of most of the planet’s roads, and even that access isn’t free at GeoGuessr’s scale. But the design principles transfer. Find a source of effectively infinite content. Make the scoring legible. Let the meta develop organically. For more on the format’s audience appeal, see our piece on why GeoGuessr is popular. For a free geography warm-up, try our Flag Quiz.

Frequently asked questions

Who made GeoGuessr?

Anton Wallén, a Swedish IT consultant, made GeoGuessr as a side project in 2013 and launched it in May of that year.

What does GeoGuessr use for its maps?

GeoGuessr uses Google Street View imagery for panoramas and a Google map for the player’s pin-drop guesses. Coverage is determined by Google’s Street View coverage area, which has expanded steadily since 2013.

When did GeoGuessr launch?

GeoGuessr launched in May 2013 at geoguessr.com. It spread quickly through sharing and press coverage. The GeoGuessr Wikipedia entry tracks the launch and growth timeline.

Is GeoGuessr still free?

Mostly not. Since the free timed mode ended in February 2024, regular play requires a subscription, though some challenges and quizzes have remained free. Free-tier limits have changed several times, so check the site for the current rules.

How does GeoGuessr scoring work?

Each round scores up to 5,000 points based on how close your guess is to the actual location. A standard game is five rounds for a maximum of 25,000 points. The scoring curve drops steeply with distance — near misses still score well; large misses fall off quickly.

The takeaway

How GeoGuessr was made is the story of a developer who took a hobby — clicking around Street View — and built the smallest possible game around it. The Street View API did the heavy lifting; the scoring made it a competition; the open world made it endlessly replayable. Thirteen years later, the format is essentially the same. For another browser experience where the rules are tiny but the runs feel different every time, the Chrome Dino game at the top of this site keeps the same trick going on a different scale: one input, infinite runs, no two perfect.

Related: How Bloons TD Was Made (Ninja Kiwi’s Story) · How Wordle Was Made in 5 Days (Josh Wardle’s Story) · How Cookie Clicker Was Made in 3 Hours (Orteil’s Story)