Flour Power

I’ve always been a big fan of Monopoly. It was probably the board game I played the most as a kid, before the video games arrived in force. A couple of years ago I even tried a computer version of it, but it was just boring playing versus the computer (I don’t think the multiplayer capabilities were very good). It was like the board version, minus the pleasure of holding all that fake money and laughing on my friends’ face when I won.

So you can imagine my excitement when, earlier today, I found out that Hasbro would release a version of the game using Google Maps as the playing board and therefore create a worldwide Monopoly game – Monopoly City Streets. WOW!

The details were very sketchy, but Hasbro has since posted on the official blog some information on how the game was created, to answer some of the speculation around it:

So, did Google build it? From the reports you would think so but the application was built by Hasbro’s UK digital agency Tribal DDB.

Have Google helped us? Of course, they’ve been great and have really gotten behind the project with all the support we needed.

Who else has helped us? The project was made possible by using the street data from OpenStreetMap, combined with Google Maps, API tastic!

They have also released a FAQ, to satisfy the more impatient while the game doesn’t start.

Other sites report some more details:

Players start the free game with three million Monopoly dollars and can buy Downing Street for $231,000, while Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where the White House stands, costs $2 million.

Rent is paid automatically each day, from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.

The game will start on the 9th of September 2009 and will go on until the 31st of January 2010.

This sounds like a brilliant idea, and I can’t wait to rush in and buy the streets from the Portuguese boardgame version.

The Google car is roaming around Portugal to add imagery to the Google Maps’ Street View. Needless to say, some unusual situations have been captured, and some people with too much time on their hands found them. And I’m glad they did, otherwise we wouldn’t have access to this:

And the best one so far features a monument by a famous Portuguese Sculptor – João Cutileiro – that makes the whole thing even funnier (it would be even better if the fountain was on…):

This last one was already removed from Google Maps…

Looking forward to getting some more of these