The super anachronistic output makes this really difficult. One of the examples was the battle in the war of the roses but all the imagery suggests over a hundred years later.
This is awesome! Definitely some more obscure historical events in there. Agree that the scoring is a bit harsh, especially since the clips are, let’s say, somewhat impressionistic.
Excellent idea and can’t wait for the next version.
This is awesome. I had the same feeling I had when I first played GeoGuessr. It's one of the first times I've seen what is obviously AI-generated video used in a super compelling way. I want to keep playing.
A few super nitpicky comments:
– I dropped my pin for "Seward's Folly" on Alaska. The videos were clear enough that I knew that's what it was, which made me excited. But then it said it happened in Washington, DC.
– It might be sample bias, but I've only gotten events after year 0 (and technically, it went from 1 BCE/BC to 1 CE/AD.
I'd love to play with this my seven year old, but some of the images are too violent. A "PG mode" would be awesome.
So there is a similar thing with a photo from (recent) history – and that has the edge of perfect accuracy – a picture of 1920s Alabama is a real representation.
I had real trouble with the battle of towton just now – the armour was “off” and someone was wondering around with a really cool white rose icon on their breastplate – and I could not work out if it was trying to be accurate or imaginative (accurate woukd look more like these things https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armorial_of_the_House_of_Pla…)
I mean the fact that there were moving videos of Dutch astronomers or Ethiopian rulers is god damn amazing – it looks luscious
But it also looks … cut-scene. It’s brilliant. But it’s also a work of imagination (LLM imagings).
So it’s quite hard to do the game itself – but it’s amazing to drop people into the context and excite a historical interest.
I could imagine this to become a pastime for curious kids, and parents having nothing against them spending time on it. It still needs development and quality improvements, but that is a direction I could imagine it taking.
YC funded a bunch of AI video companies (4+), and AFAICT the Eggnog folks are hustling the hardest.
The path forward as a foundation video model company closed, so they worked hard on end-to-end story creation workflows and mobile.
Turns out that's hard to gain traction and distribution amongst dozens of other similarly shaped startups. So they hack on games and fun viral loops.
Keep at it! This is super clever. You're getting noticed.
Video is going to be huge, and even though power law dictates there will be only a few winners, I think there's space for teams hustling this hard if you can find distribution.
Let the foundation video model companies fight to the death. They've over-raised and are being commoditized by Tencent and Alibaba's open source foundation video models (Hunyuan and Wan). You can use their APIs on the cheap and still provide value. And value will accrue to the application layer.
yeah it's a cool concept, but knowing what I know about the ability of generative AI to accurately replicate specific moments of history, it falls flat.
The whole point of this kind of thing should be to reward people who can recognize "that architectural style wasn't invented until the 13th century" but that's precisely the sort of thing image models cannot do reliably.
Personnaly I didn't felt as if I was trying to recognize a place and period in history, but trying to guess what prompts were used to generate the pictures. Or at least for some of the pictures where I wasn't as sure of the event (like seeing the rose on a picture for the war of the roses).
Also I didn't listen to many of the sounds, but I got English voices for something happening in France (the Fauvisme guess).
But still I had some fun and it's nice to see a good use for AI
This is cool, but I'm not sure some of the hints are not more red herrings than anything else. Because AI sort of blends things, the prompt needs to be spot on or, for example, India starts looking like any part of the middle east. Traditional China looks like Japan, etc.
Also some of the temporal clues were very good, some were 'wtf'.
I also laughed at some of the hallucination I witnessed. Like a group of people staring in a telescope pointing straight at a white wall.
Fun though, just needs to be honed in a little.
It would help to have markers on the timeline for the different ages, at least for the first round! e.g. Bronze age.
You already sort of do, being a Gregorian timeline and marking 0 AD as Christ's birth. That's a dead giveaway when you see crosses. So I think it would be fair and useful to give a range of eras as markers on the timeline.
The map could also be continental, and the locations more precise than the country.
The map could be more exciting, and change based on the timeline selection! It's currently showing the "current" map and not the map of the era; which in some respect is relevant.
Finally, the scoring could be more explanatory, you got 5,000 / 10,000 for the following reason / calculation method. Maybe a graph of points per time correction and location. It could also be more comprehensive scoring, with a slight multiplier for streaks, a badge for being good at temporal location vs. geolocation etc.
Scoring could animate up, to gamify the experience, create a sort of level end screen that builds up excitement. The map could animate and so could the timeline in this end phase.
I like the idea, there is a lot you could do to push this further.
Interesting that the AI makes many of the outdoor structures look ancient rather than how they'd look in the time period. People walking over crumbling ancient roads whole fallen ruins loom over them isn't exactly accurate.
I really liked it but felt some of the image hints were a bit ambiguous at times which annoyed me.
I had one for the US purchase of Alaska which I got from the images of Americans building log cabins in an icy landscape and another image showing an American signing a document. I assumed it would be either Washington or Alaska (Anchorage I guess), but wasn't sure which because it depends on if you weight the signing of the agreement over the building of US settlements. It could have been either given the images were of different locations.
Similarly I had picture of British dude creating telescopes and realised it was very likely Herschel. But I also knew Herschels early work was done in Bath, while his most famous telescope was built later in Slough. Again, it wasn't entirely clear which location it would have been referring to.
Maybe I'm just being stupid though. I think you could have argued that right answers in both cases were more likely to be Washington and Bath.
That said, I really really liked it and think you have something here. Personally I'd play this over Geoguessr any day and I'll show my GF it tomorrow because I think she'll also like the history aspect of it.
Also, might worth lowering the distance penalty if someone guesses the right country, but the wrong point? Events in large countries are more risky just because of their size. Eg, if an event happened in France but you click Germany you'll often get less of a distance penalty than correctly guessing an event happened in the US but clicking the wrong part of the US.
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33 Comments
typpo
This is so fun and creative. Congrats on launching!
darkstar_16
Loved it. Congratulations on the launch.
jtwaleson
Super cool! Tried a couple of rounds, will try it with my oldest kid who's very into history tomorrow, I'm sure he'll love it.
renewiltord
These are beautiful! Great stuff.
voisin
This is killer. Love it! Are you planning to monetize it or keeping it as is?
baal80spam
This is really cool, congratulations!
stingrae
My first reaction is that the scoring is too harsh. I got within 50 years and 100 km and the resulting score is 7,406 / 10,000.
_Rabs_
Strange your website isn't working on Mullvad's Browser.
On the Guess page it just has a blank screen with the 4 cinematic clips below…
arrowsmith
This is a great idea – loved it!
And I’d love to see the idea expanded further. “AI recreations of historical scenes” is an idea with tons of interesting potential.
bthater
The super anachronistic output makes this really difficult. One of the examples was the battle in the war of the roses but all the imagery suggests over a hundred years later.
cflewis
I enjoyed this a lot. Congratulations :)
backprop1989
This is awesome! Definitely some more obscure historical events in there. Agree that the scoring is a bit harsh, especially since the clips are, let’s say, somewhat impressionistic.
Excellent idea and can’t wait for the next version.
Mobius01
I love the concept! A really compelling game , especially for history nerds like me. Two thoughts:
1. The AI imagery is often misaligned with the actual answer, with some anachronistic elements.
2. The scoring seems harsh. I got a couple of answers within 50km and/or 10 years in the time scale but was still severely penalized.
Good luck with this, I will definitely watch your progress and pass it along
cdjk
This is awesome. I had the same feeling I had when I first played GeoGuessr. It's one of the first times I've seen what is obviously AI-generated video used in a super compelling way. I want to keep playing.
A few super nitpicky comments:
– I dropped my pin for "Seward's Folly" on Alaska. The videos were clear enough that I knew that's what it was, which made me excited. But then it said it happened in Washington, DC.
– It might be sample bias, but I've only gotten events after year 0 (and technically, it went from 1 BCE/BC to 1 CE/AD.
I'd love to play with this my seven year old, but some of the images are too violent. A "PG mode" would be awesome.
lifeisstillgood
So there is a similar thing with a photo from (recent) history – and that has the edge of perfect accuracy – a picture of 1920s Alabama is a real representation.
I had real trouble with the battle of towton just now – the armour was “off” and someone was wondering around with a really cool white rose icon on their breastplate – and I could not work out if it was trying to be accurate or imaginative (accurate woukd look more like these things https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armorial_of_the_House_of_Pla…)
I mean the fact that there were moving videos of Dutch astronomers or Ethiopian rulers is god damn amazing – it looks luscious
But it also looks … cut-scene. It’s brilliant. But it’s also a work of imagination (LLM imagings).
So it’s quite hard to do the game itself – but it’s amazing to drop people into the context and excite a historical interest.
meta_ai_x
As an Indian, The irony wasn't lost on me when I placed the marker on West Indies (Caribbean islands) when the actual Spot was East India.
Delomomonl
What a fun idea :)
dmje
Really fun, well executed. I like :-)
4ndrewl
I love the idea, but GenAI isn't really up to it. The images are awful – like a Hammer Horror/Netflix-does-history vibe, but it's strangely addictive!
qwertox
I could imagine this to become a pastime for curious kids, and parents having nothing against them spending time on it. It still needs development and quality improvements, but that is a direction I could imagine it taking.
Oras
This is truly remarkable- one of the best use cases for text-to-video products! Lots of fun with learning aspect
dartos
I was excited by the title until I saw it was all AI :(
It would’ve been cool to collect actual images from history. I’m sure there are 1000s of public domain images that could be used.
echelon
YC funded a bunch of AI video companies (4+), and AFAICT the Eggnog folks are hustling the hardest.
The path forward as a foundation video model company closed, so they worked hard on end-to-end story creation workflows and mobile.
Turns out that's hard to gain traction and distribution amongst dozens of other similarly shaped startups. So they hack on games and fun viral loops.
Keep at it! This is super clever. You're getting noticed.
Video is going to be huge, and even though power law dictates there will be only a few winners, I think there's space for teams hustling this hard if you can find distribution.
Let the foundation video model companies fight to the death. They've over-raised and are being commoditized by Tencent and Alibaba's open source foundation video models (Hunyuan and Wan). You can use their APIs on the cheap and still provide value. And value will accrue to the application layer.
Focus on what the creators want and need.
Vaslo
Ignore the AI comments, this app is so much more flexible with it, and the pictures will only get better. Great idea for an app!
kdamica
Cool idea but the AI images are kind of lame. For anyone who wants something like this I recommend NYT's Flashback quiz: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/upshot/flashb…
lukev
yeah it's a cool concept, but knowing what I know about the ability of generative AI to accurately replicate specific moments of history, it falls flat.
The whole point of this kind of thing should be to reward people who can recognize "that architectural style wasn't invented until the 13th century" but that's precisely the sort of thing image models cannot do reliably.
baud147258
Personnaly I didn't felt as if I was trying to recognize a place and period in history, but trying to guess what prompts were used to generate the pictures. Or at least for some of the pictures where I wasn't as sure of the event (like seeing the rose on a picture for the war of the roses).
Also I didn't listen to many of the sounds, but I got English voices for something happening in France (the Fauvisme guess).
But still I had some fun and it's nice to see a good use for AI
joshdavham
This was awesome! I think this project is super creative and original. Also, I got top 63%!
keyle
This is cool, but I'm not sure some of the hints are not more red herrings than anything else. Because AI sort of blends things, the prompt needs to be spot on or, for example, India starts looking like any part of the middle east. Traditional China looks like Japan, etc.
Also some of the temporal clues were very good, some were 'wtf'.
I also laughed at some of the hallucination I witnessed. Like a group of people staring in a telescope pointing straight at a white wall.
Fun though, just needs to be honed in a little.
It would help to have markers on the timeline for the different ages, at least for the first round! e.g. Bronze age.
You already sort of do, being a Gregorian timeline and marking 0 AD as Christ's birth. That's a dead giveaway when you see crosses. So I think it would be fair and useful to give a range of eras as markers on the timeline.
The map could also be continental, and the locations more precise than the country.
The map could be more exciting, and change based on the timeline selection! It's currently showing the "current" map and not the map of the era; which in some respect is relevant.
Finally, the scoring could be more explanatory, you got 5,000 / 10,000 for the following reason / calculation method. Maybe a graph of points per time correction and location. It could also be more comprehensive scoring, with a slight multiplier for streaks, a badge for being good at temporal location vs. geolocation etc.
Scoring could animate up, to gamify the experience, create a sort of level end screen that builds up excitement. The map could animate and so could the timeline in this end phase.
I like the idea, there is a lot you could do to push this further.
polishdude20
Interesting that the AI makes many of the outdoor structures look ancient rather than how they'd look in the time period. People walking over crumbling ancient roads whole fallen ruins loom over them isn't exactly accurate.
oortoo
"When're we dropping, boys?"
kypro
I really liked it but felt some of the image hints were a bit ambiguous at times which annoyed me.
I had one for the US purchase of Alaska which I got from the images of Americans building log cabins in an icy landscape and another image showing an American signing a document. I assumed it would be either Washington or Alaska (Anchorage I guess), but wasn't sure which because it depends on if you weight the signing of the agreement over the building of US settlements. It could have been either given the images were of different locations.
Similarly I had picture of British dude creating telescopes and realised it was very likely Herschel. But I also knew Herschels early work was done in Bath, while his most famous telescope was built later in Slough. Again, it wasn't entirely clear which location it would have been referring to.
Maybe I'm just being stupid though. I think you could have argued that right answers in both cases were more likely to be Washington and Bath.
That said, I really really liked it and think you have something here. Personally I'd play this over Geoguessr any day and I'll show my GF it tomorrow because I think she'll also like the history aspect of it.
Also, might worth lowering the distance penalty if someone guesses the right country, but the wrong point? Events in large countries are more risky just because of their size. Eg, if an event happened in France but you click Germany you'll often get less of a distance penalty than correctly guessing an event happened in the US but clicking the wrong part of the US.
aaron695
[dead]