Google Monopoly Or Monopoly City Streets Going Live Soon
This will be the greatest game ever because you can play it in real life. You probably heard of Google Monopoly, and you probably now that it will go live today, September 9, 2009. The official name of the game is Monopoly City Streets and it will be playable using Google Maps, however, Google and Hasbro didn’t announce if this is a game in partnership with the search giant, or if the developer is just using Google’s Maps.
Monopoly City Streets will be a MMO, and you can play with people around the world. You can own any street in the world, you can build houses, castles, and skyscrapers on your streets, and anybody who comes on your street will have to pay rent. The Google Monopoly game will also feature Monopoly Chance Cards that will allow you to build Hazards on your enemy’s streets. If you cannot be world’s richest person in real life, then you might be able to become world’s richest great landowner.
Although all the details about the game are not official, it is rumored that all players will start with $3 million to buy streets from all over the world. If you cannot wait anymore then be cool because the game is starting in less than half-an-hour at: 12:15pm GMT Wednesday 9/9/09. So take a shower, change your underwear, eat as much as you can cause you’re definitely spending your entire day in front of the PC!
Monopoly City Streets Blog via Monopoly City Streets
Update: Google Monopoly or Monopoly City Streets is now live and you can play it here. Please note that it loads very slow, probably because of the heavy traffic.
- THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY:
- Dragos Pirvu
This is an interesting game. But the strong emphasis on Google Maps seems to neglect the fact that it appears to be the map data from openstreetmap.org that actually allows this game to work. Although this is pure speculation, my guess would be that google “only” provide pretty bitmaped pictures of a map and geocoding, but due to licensing issues can’t provide the data necessary in a computer readable form to allow to work with and power this game. This is why they use OpenStreetMap data instead of google for this and therefore this game seems to highlight exactly why it is so important to provide free and open access to the underlying vector data in order to enable new and innovative ways of using maps, which is the main goal of the openstreetmap project.
For those who don’t know openstreetmap, check it out, it is the “wikipedia of maps”, i.e. everyone can freely add their road and contribute information and together we can build a super detailed worldwide map! And the best thing is everyone can freely use the full data to do new and innovative things with it such as create this game.