San Francisco as a video game: an entire city rendered in the browser

The site sf.thijs.gg opens San Francisco — The Game: a three-dimensional version of the entire city in which buildings and streets are generated from real map data and streamed in as the player moves through it.

What the project is

Judging by the interface the page exposes, the system feeds the city in as tiles: the HUD shows tile-stream state, a loading percentage (for example "Neighborhood ready 100%") and zoom levels from Z15 to Z20. The underlying data comes from Apple's MapKit — Apple Inc.'s copyright notice appears on the page — and OpenStreetMap contributors.

How you play it

The controls follow standard game conventions: WASD to move, the mouse to look, Space to jump, Shift to run, C for the camera and H for a glider. Pressing V summons a car. The interface also includes a minimap, a compass readout ("S · 177°"), speed and distance controls, a teleport function ("Click to teleport") and a chat panel. A spawn indicator reading "SPAWN 24/49" suggests dozens of starting points across the city.

Extra layers

A debug mode colours buildings by their owner ("FILL = SELECTED OWNER", "OUTLINE = RESIDENT"), offering a way to look at the city's property structure. Resource counters for wood, stone and metal sit on screen alongside a "LIFE OFF" toggle, hints that the project carries a simulation layer on top of the geographic visualisation.

Who built it

The author is Thijs Simonian, a San Francisco-based developer and Stanford student whose portfolio lists work at Discord, a $100,000 bug bounty and the Truth or Dare Discord bot; one of his earlier projects, Topo-Transit, maps live train positions in the city. A city-scale 3D world running in a browser tab shows how far streaming map data has come in ordinary web technology.