He Memorized the World With Google Maps. Now He’s Exploring It.

19.06.2024 - 10:29 / nytimes.com

Back in 2021, a 22-year-old from Arkansas named Trevor Rainbolt shuttered himself in his Los Angeles apartment to memorize the world. For months, he spent his time studying Google Street View from his desk chair. Delivery drivers handed over his meals; a barber came to style his hair. After a while, his memory grew planetary. When you see cabbage-like plants thriving along the sides of a Russian country road, he learned, you’re most likely looking at Sakhalin Island. On a bridge lined with pea-green pavement? You’re above a river in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province. If your vista, but for the sweep of golden grasslands, screams South Africa, you’ll be in Eswatini.

Rainbolt’s growing topographical erudition was in the service of winning at an online game called GeoGuessr. The game presents the player with a randomly selected image of a stretch of road on Google Street View; at the top of the screen is a timer, and at the bottom is a world map. The aim is to use signs, infrastructure, vegetation and any other distinctive elements to locate the images as swiftly as possible on the map. Rainbolt is the game’s most famous player and a legend in the community. His millions of online followers scroll through videos in which he sits at his desk, pallid and poker-faced, intuiting the location of some remote lane in a blink.

He recognizes the precise rusty hue of Beninese soil. He can sense when grass is Mongolian. His astonishing skill extends beyond the game, too. He geolocates old family photos sent in by his fans, and when a TikTok influencer tried to gatekeep the source of New York’s “best” bagels (“you’ll never taste this goodness”), Rainbolt used subtle visual details to identify the restaurant. (It was Bagel Market.) His ability is uncanny, even unsettling, and he performs it with the shtick of an evil genius. “Nice,” goes his deadpan catchphrase, mumbled when he lands on or near his target. “We’ll take that.”

Rainbolt knows nearly nothing about lands beyond Street View’s reach. Up until a year and a half ago, he owned no functional passport and had never left North America. Late in 2022, though — after an evening spent, as usual, on GeoGuessr — he felt an unfamiliar pull. He imagined himself strolling the exotic roads he had memorized on his screen. He thought about glimpsing distinctive bollards I.R.L., seeing the world’s telltale street lamps in 3-D fullness. He had a yearning to view streets.

So Rainbolt sold his possessions, gave up his apartment and decided to live off earnings from his GeoGuessr content. He applied for an expedited passport; the day after it arrived, he purchased a flight to Germany. Back then, the country’s most recent Street View images were from 2009, and he was