Developer implements 9 year old April Fool’s joke
Google Maps on the NES. (Screenshot: ciciplusplus / Youtube)
Google announced nine years ago that it would bring the map service Google Maps to the NES. The whole thing was just an April Fool’s joke at the time. But now a developer has actually put the idea into practice.
April fools had a long tradition on Google. Up until the start of the corona pandemic, the group kept introducing more or less silly products on April 1, which seldom caused a laugh, but at least attracted attention. One of these fictional products from 2012 showed one Eight-bit version of Google Maps for Nintendo’s 1983 NES console. One developer, however, apparently found the idea so interesting that he has actually implemented the April Fool’s joke at the time.
The Google Maps version for the NES relies on a server component that translates the map material into eight-bit tiles. The hobbyist got the idea from another developer who had already experimented with it shortly before the publication of Google’s original April Fool’s joke, Translate aerial photos from Microsoft’s Bing service into eight-bit landscapes.
The hardware also had to be adapted, of course, because the NES released in the 1980s does not support the Internet. The developer chose a Raspberry Pi as the heart of his Google Maps module. This in turn transmits the graphics to the Nintendo console.
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Google Maps on the NES: Developer wants to improve the project further
According to the published video, the Google April Fool’s joke replica is currently unable to search for specific locations. Instead, you can only move the cursor over the world map at the moment and zoom into the map material if you are interested. The developer of the project wants to integrate a search function in the future and publish the whole thing later as an open source project. In addition, the hardware should be adapted so that it really fits into the housing of an NES module.
