GeoGuessr trailblazer hits the ground running

Trevor Rainbolt, 24, wearily rises, his eyes cataloguing the features of yet another Airbnb. Outside, Seville is making its morning noises. Rainbolt, who grew up in Arkansas, had decided to embark on a leisurely round-the-world trip, first flying to Germany in November and from there crossing the border into Belgium and the Netherlands then — having frantically googled “warmest city in Europe” — on to Spain. However, something is off. Wherever he goes, Rainbolt can’t shake a recurrent feeling of déjà vu. Everywhere is eerily familiar, as if he’s encountering it for a second time. Of course, in a way, he is: he’s seen Seville before. Indeed, he’s seen almost everywhere before, even though, barring one family cruise holiday as a child, this is his first trip beyond the US. 

“It’s like everything you see, you’ve studied for so long but it’s an actual tangible object, not just pixels,” he tells me over a video call, pushing a single strand of fringe out of his eyes. In one sense Rainbolt might know the world better than anybody. He can tell a Guatemalan telephone pole from a Mexican one, and knows that Turkey and Australia share a similar bollard design (white with a single red stripe). He’s an expert on dirt, too, and tells me that the soil in Nigeria and on Darwin Island are matching shades of red. 

The reason Rainbolt has such an acute, pedantic knowledge of the world is because he’s sunk hundreds of hours into something called GeoGuessr, an online game that drops the player randomly into Google Street View, requiring them to use geographic clues to figure out where they are. Nerdiness runs through GeoGuessr all the way to its inception, when, in 2013, a Swedish software engineer named Anton Wallén was playing with the Google Maps software and posted the resultant application on Reddit. GeoGuessr now has 55mn registered players, thanks to a surge of interest during Covid, when, along with Rainbolt, a newly housebound population began signing up. The company now has 50 staff, having doubled its headcount over the past year, during which 15mn new users joined. In October, 30 international teams gathered in Paris to compete for the first GueoGuessr World Cup and a prize pool of €25,000.

Initially, for Rainbolt, it was just a hobby. He was working for a social media company producing Snapchat content and would play in his off-hours. “I’ve never been good at geography at all,” he laughs, “I was probably as good as the average American.” But he became obsessed and, by June 2021, started playing the game one hour before work, then solidly after work until about two in the morning. On weekends he racked up about 18 hours a day. “People ask how I do it or if there’s a shortcut,” he says. “It’s literally just putting the time in.” 

At that stage — though he’s keen to tell me he was enjoying himself — Rainbolt was essentially just another social life and regular sleep cycle thrown on the pyre of online gaming. Outside a relatively small community of competitive GeoGuessrs, Rainbolt’s well-honed skills were unrecognised. However, this changed just after midnight on January 1 2022, when he decided to start posting regularly on TikTok, beginning with a post explaining his top tips for locating countries. “I know it’s so cliché,” he recalls, “but I woke up the next morning and it had more than a million views. Then it got crazy. I’d post another video and it would hit a million. The next would hit two million. I’d go outside and someone would be like ‘Are you the Google Maps guy?’”

Soon Rainbolt’s content was trending everywhere: the top post on Reddit, TikTok followers flooding in (he now has 2mn). Then major brands sensed an opportunity: restaurant chain Chipotle sponsored one of his videos. Google reached out, as did the NFL. After that came strange requests as more and more people started noting his talents. Bounty hunters tried to enlist Rainbolt to help track people down, TV shows asked him to validate locations, ominous direct messages wanted to know the location of girls on Instagram. He tells me he’s turned them all down. “Obviously I can tell what people’s intentions are.” 

He has, however, responded to a few inquiries. When one follower sent him a black and white photo along with a message: “This is the only photo I have of my mother. Would it be possible to find the location? I was adopted back in 1995 and only have this photo before she passed away.” Rainbolt quickly traced it to the tip of Lake Ritsa in north-western Abkhazia. Same forest, same mountains. Another wanted him to locate a picture of his late father. After scanning every single Greek island with a north-facing port, Rainbolt realised the only option was Cyprus, a restaurant on Tylos beach to be exact. 

There is, of course, a method to all of this, as Rainbolt explains. “There’s tons of memorisation. Not the locations themselves but features that lead you to that location.” Street View is largely captured by cameras mounted on a Google car (plus a few pedestrian filming units), so memorising bollards, red lines, road quality, road width and signage is a good place to start. Architecture is also an important giveaway. After a while you begin to intuit that, “this sign is only found in Japan, or this thing is only found in this region of Moscow”. When maps are updated, GeoGuessrs have to put in the time to learn them — large sections of India, for instance, were recently added to Street View. 

Obviously, I decide to test Rainbolt. I flash up a few Street View screenshots and ask him to locate them. The first he gets immediately. He knows it’s Yakutsk, Russia, because there was a forest fire when the Google car drove past, which meant the sky was tinted in online pictures. He knows a lot of similar cheats. If the car is white, you could be in Chile, Peru or Bolivia, but if it’s black, Argentina. If there’s a leaf on the camera you’re in Australia’s Northern Territory. The second photo he narrows down to Indonesia — based on the telephone poles — but can’t locate it precisely without more time. “Indonesia is really tricky,” he says, “because it’s so big and there’s so many different islands.”

Rainbolt isn’t the only pro-GeoGuessr, although his TikTok virality means he’s probably the most famous. (Earlier this month he paid for a huge billboard advert in Boston, with a photograph of himself as if looking out through a computer camera and the words “This is Boston. Nice” — in the hope it would be captured by Google Street View and serve as an in-joke to other players.)

“If you’re playing the game,” he says, “you’re probably playing because of either me or this guy GeoWizard” — referring to an older player called Tom Davies, from Aldridge in the West Midlands. I’d actually heard of Davies before when a friend showed me one of his “straight line quests” on YouTube. These are strange, endurance-type vlogs, where Davies attempts to cross a country in an exact straight line, meticulously planning his route and traversing all obstacles, from fences and hedgerows to angry farmers and raging rivers. However, Davies is best known for his GeoGuessr accomplishments. He once guessed a location in Risan, Montenegro, almost exactly; he was off by just five yards. 

Where are you? (answers below)

It’s hard to know where Rainbolt’s career might lead when the inevitable happens and people move on. With platforms like TikTok and Instagram, the cycle of viral fame seems to be getting faster year on year. I suggest to him that he consider working for journalists or investigative companies such as Bellingcat, who use “micro-details” such as “paint patterns on building columns, the design of a no-smoking sign” to identify potential sites. 

“I don’t want to touch stuff like that yet. It’s a lot of responsibility and emotional baggage,” he responds. And his concern isn’t unfounded. Talking to the New Yorker, Davies recalled how he once used his powers to help someone locate an artillery attack during the Nagorno-Karabakh war — only to worry later “that he may have ended up helping the wrong side”. 

However, regardless of what Rainbolt decides to do, he’s managed to acquire a skill that didn’t exist just 15 years ago. In an increasingly digitised, available world, there’ll be more people wielding new, unpredictable abilities. The Google Man may be a harbinger of a new age. In the meantime, Rainbolt dreams of arriving at the limestone hills of Laos, a country yet to be traversed by Google Street View, promising discoveries with weight and form in a world beyond the pixels.

“Where are you?” answers — A: rural road just northwest of Pomeroy, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa; B: Westerstraat, Amsterdam; C: Nethergate, Dundee, Scotland; D: Manado, North Sulawesi

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