A few gus from Intel bent on pushing the boundaries of PC gaming decided to try and develop a video game using Google maps as their primary platform, their end result was “Mars Sucks.”
We decided to overlay an image of a Martian craft cockpit over the Google Earth window and let the standard Google Earth controls handle moving around the globe. In the cockpit, players see a sequence of clues about the location of each Martian invader. Each clue gets more specific about where to find the Martian.
For example, the first clue for one country is: This middle-eastern country has almost 2 million square kilometers of land but contains no bodies of fresh water. The third clue is: The people in this kingdom speak Arabic in cities such as Mecca, Medina, and the capital Riyadh. The 5th and final clue identifies the country as Saudi Arabia and gives the longitude and latitude of the country. We put the clues and locations in a text file so that any player (or teacher) could easily edit the clues to create a modified game.
Unlike other existing games available for Google Earth, such as “Find Skull Island” and “EarthContest,” which require players to switch back and forth between a web browser and Google Earth, all the action in “Mars Sucks” takes place within a single window.
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