Google Wins The Game Of Risk As Street View Comes To Antarctica

In the game or Risk, the main objective is to take control over every land mass on the planet. With an update to Street View today, Google has just completed that.

The original idea behind Google Street View was a good one: give everyone in the world a view from any street in the world. Of course, when it launched in May 2007, Street View was only available in five cities in the U.S. But the update today — over three years later — completes an impressive feat for the product: it’s now available on every continent. Yes, all seven. Yes, that includes Antarctica. Yes, a place with no real streets.

To be fair, clicking around Street View on Antarctica, it doesn’t seem nearly as robust as Street View in other places. In fact, it seems like many of the views are just of big Panoramio pictures (Google’s geo photo service). I can only find a couple of spots that let you scroll around 360 degrees as you can with most of the rest of Street View. But then again, also to be fair, Antarctica doesn’t really have any streets. Sure, there are probably some roads for research facilities, but who knows how long they last in the icy wasteland.

Along with the Antarctica update, Google also added Brazil and Ireland to its Street View roster today.

Oh, and as a random sidenote: most versions of the game of Risk don’t actually include Antarctica as a landmass you have to conquer. So Google is going above and beyond here.

Update: Google wanted to clarify that panoramas are available for an area of Antarctica called Half Moon Island — the rest is Panoramio photos for now. A full map of where Street View is available here.