Draft:TimeGuessr
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Declined by Sulfurboy 26 days ago.
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Comment: I'm not seeing the reliable or in-depth coverage required to meet WP:GNG here unfortunately. For one, a quarter of the sources are for DownDetector and using this as a proxy for a page about Gus Owen doesn't quite seem to hit the mark. The coverage on the game has some trivial coverage by RS like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, but a lot of this is coming from IGDB which is not reliable, or the Spark Impact Report which would seem intimately and promotionally connected to the subject as a client of Spark. Actually a lot of this is just citing coverage on Owen and briefly mentioning he created it. Maybe an Owen page may be the way to go here? VRXCES (talk) 04:29, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for the feedback, i've added dedicated coverage from NPR (Sept 2026), which discusses the game in detail; chopped down the Downdetector citations from four to one and reduced reliance on the Spark Impact Report, removing the claims it was the sole source for. IGDB is now backed by an independent source rather than standing alone. Happy to make further changes if needed!!! Leannejohnstone1984 (talk) 15:26, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
| TimeGuessr | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | Gus Owen |
| Publisher | TimeGuessr Limited |
| Platform | Web browser |
| Release | March 5, 2023[1] |
| Genres | Trivia, puzzle |
| Mode | Single-player |
TimeGuessr is a browser-based photo-guessing game created by Gus Owen, in which players attempt to identify the year and geographic location of historical and contemporary photographs. The game combines elements of geography-guessing games such as GeoGuessr with a historical dating component, awarding points based on the accuracy of a player's year and location guesses.
Gameplay
[edit]Each round presents the player with a photograph. The player places a marker on a world map to guess the photograph's location and selects a year using a slider to guess when it was taken. Points are awarded based on the proximity of both guesses to the correct answer, with a maximum daily score across five rounds. TimeGuessr releases a new set of five photographs each day, similar to daily puzzle games such as Wordle.[2]
History
[edit]TimeGuessr was created by Gus Owen, who grew up near Newcastle upon Tyne and began developing the game as a side project during his gap year before starting a mathematics degree at the University of Leeds.[3] The game was released on March 5, 2023,[4][5] with a mobile app following in May 2025.[6]
Owen has said the idea was inspired by daily puzzle games such as Wordle and by Instagram accounts posting historical photographs from the North East of England, and that a YouTube video by GeoWizard helped popularize the game following a slow initial release.[3]
The game uses a library of licensed and public-domain photographs spanning from the early 20th century to the present day.[citation needed]
Reception
[edit]TimeGuessr was featured by NPR in a September 2026 roundup of daily puzzle games by pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes, who described the game's mechanics in detail alongside four other titles.[2] The Japanese technology site Gigazine published a detailed hands-on write-up in August 2023, walking through several example rounds and the specific historical photographs used in the game.[7] The Portuguese site TEK (Sapo) and the German gaming blog Stubenzocker both published dedicated write-ups of the game,[8][9] as did the Brazilian outlet Aventuras na História.[10]
TimeGuessr was also included by The Guardian in a roundup of unusual websites in August 2023.[11]
In November 2024, a photograph in the game depicting a wallaby in Basel, Switzerland, attracted online attention in Switzerland, prompting coverage from the Swiss outlet Basler Zeitung and an ETH Zürich library blog.[12][13]
Der Spiegel included TimeGuessr in a 2025 roundup of browser and mobile games,[14] and the French outlet 20 Minutes profiled the game in December 2025.[15]
In November 2025, Owen created a satirical status page for the outage-tracking service Downdetector after it went down during a Cloudflare outage; the site prompted a chain of similar parody pages and was covered by PC Gamer, which identified Owen by name as the creator of TimeGuessr.[16]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ↑ "Timeguessr". IGDB.
- 1 2 Linda Holmes (2026-09-05). "If you prefer puzzles to doomscrolling, here are 5 great games to check out". NPR.
- 1 2 "Timeguessr". Spark Impact Report 2024. University of Leeds.
- ↑ "Timeguessr". IGDB.
- ↑ "Timeguessr". Stubenzocker. 2025-05-29.
- ↑ "Timeguessr". Stubenzocker. 2025-05-29.
- ↑ "TimeGuessr". Gigazine. 2023-08-21.
- ↑ "TimeGuessr desafia a memória e capacidade de ligar imagens e locais". TEK/Sapo.
- ↑ "Timeguessr". Stubenzocker. 2025-05-29.
- ↑ "TimeGuessr: o site que ensina história através de desafios fotográficos". Aventuras na História.
- ↑ "Fish doorbells, historic sandwiches: 50 of the weirdest, most wonderful corners of the web – picked by an expert". The Guardian. 2023-08-31.
- ↑ "Basel: Das Wallaby von Esmé Levante kommt zu neuem Ruhm". Basler Zeitung.
- ↑ "Plötzlich rätselt das Netz über ein Känguru in Basel". ETH-Bibliothek Crowdsourcing Blog. 2024-11-22.
- ↑ "Desert Golfing, Travle, Townscaper: Handy-Games für Handy-Games-Hasser". Der Spiegel.
- ↑ "Connaissez TimeGuessr". 20 Minutes.
- ↑ Tyler Wilde (2025-11-19). "After Downdetector itself went down, someone made a Downdetector Downdetector, and then someone made a Downdetector Downdetector Downdetector, and then…". PC Gamer.
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