Google Earth is more than just a 3D map of the Earth. Between the cool data and the sophisticated interfaces to connect back end servers with Google Earth, it’s only natural games have been developed as well. Here are the best games I’ve seen with Google Earth over the last three years:
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Flight Simulator– Google themselves added perhaps the best game as a built-in feature: did you know there’s a flight simulator in Google Earth? Read some tips on starting and using the flight simulator, and here is a video for watching it in action.
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DND Game – You can actually play a role-playing dungeons and dragons game on top of Google Earth. The game is a multiplayer game in which you go and fight monsters found across the planet. Read more.
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Mars Sucks – This game places you in a space ship and you find aliens based on clues and blast them with your big guns. Read more.
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Football – This game lets you play an American Football game within Google Earth. Read more.
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Milktruck Madness – This one is played with the new Google Earth plugin. It simply lets you drive a milktruck around the Earth. But, it’s fun! Read more, try it out here.
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Battleship – This was a really cool idea for a game where you would mix going in the real world with a cell phone with Google Earth to play a battleship game. Unfortunately not available to play now. Read more.
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Where in the World – Each month, Google puts out a free newsletter which has a puzzle game. They give you a screenshot of a place on Earth, and you have to find where on the Earth it was taken. See a recent example, and you can see all the issues of the newsletter here.
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National Geographic Geography Quiz – As part of National Geography Awareness Week, National Geographic made this cool quiz in Google Earth. You can try the quiz here (a local copy, their link is broken at the moment). Read more.
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Fun and Games – The Google Earth Community has a whole forum dedicated to games in Google Earth. This is mostly guessing games similar to the newsletter, but it’s played in a forum and some of the puzzles are much more sophisticated. Read more.
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Geo Whiz – Yet another geography quiz game, this one is more interactive. It also uses the Google Earth plugin (Windows only for now). Check it out.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
And What about GEWar? If I recall it was the First game to be made for Google Earth.
Another fun game is Place Spotting. Here is one I made up: http://www.placespotting.com/solve.php?placeId=11EF-4BDCDD65-ACE. It is similar to Where in the World listed above, but it is easier to see where you are and there are written clues!
GEWar is by far the best game for Googleearth. Ive been playing for about 7 years now. Thats longer then any other game Ive ever played
How do you find Ingress?
You can’t forget Monopoly City Streets! Sadly it was only playable for a few months, but by far it was the best google earth game to play!
if some one could figure out how to apply video games that are currently being played. Like navyfield onto google earth, that would be AWESOME
http://www.navyfield.com