Angus Owen is a first-year maths student at University of Leeds and started TimeGuessr as a little side project during his gap year before University. He was playing a lot of the daily puzzle games like Wordle and wanted to try his hand at making one himself. Gus grew up near Newcastle and followed a few accounts on Instagram which post interesting historic photos from around the area which gave him the idea to build a game where you would have to guess where and when in the world old photos were taken.
‘I had never built a website before and had very little experience coding, so I had to teach myself how to do everything.’
After launching the game, Gus posted about TimeGuessr in a few corners of the internet and got hundreds of comments from people saying how much they loved the idea, but it didn’t go much further than that. To get it to really kick off he badgered a youtuber called GeoWizard every day for about a month to play it, who then ended up posting a video to YouTube which received about 300,000 views and ever since then the game hasn’t stopped growing.
