Hush Atlas

About the project

Hush Atlas is a walking game about the ground under a city. You walk, and the phone takes a reading of the rock layers beneath your feet: how old they are, what this place was millions of years ago and who could have lived here. A reading is taken where you are standing and nowhere else, so the collection grows only by actually going somewhere.

Readings fall into three collection tracks and cover 17 geological intervals, from the Hadean 4.567 billion years ago to the Quaternary. Cards come in two kinds and never pass for one another: a confirmed card rests on a real record in a database and carries its source, while a reconstruction is inferred from the age and the rock type and says so plainly.

The data is not invented: geological polygons come from Macrostrat, fossil occurrences and taxa from the Paleobiology Database, organism silhouettes from PhyloPic, and the map itself from OpenStreetMap. The map shows the ground around you — places already read are filled in, the rest waits.

The game is still in development: it is not in any store yet, and there is no release date to give.