Game Fans (And Trolls) Are Racing To Claim Pixels in Wplace

I’m looking at a map of my city, Kansas City, right now, and wondering what I should do for fun this coming weekend. Should I visit the giant purple Zoroark stomping over downtown? If I want to see the Superman with the glowing red eyes in the suburbs to the south, I first have to pass Ralsei Deltarune sitting atop the highway, smoking an enormous blunt. I could go visit the Northland, but there is an enormous United Airlines plane straddling the Missouri River, which might make transit a bit confusing. Hmm. Options, options.

That probably sounded like nonsense if you’re not aware of wplace, a delightful new time waster in the form of a world map where users can draw a single pixel in a color of their choice, wherever they like, once every 30 seconds. If that sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of one of its main inspirations: /r/place, the Reddit game with a blank canvas that let users similarly place one pixel at a time. Though /r/place closed a few years ago, wplace has rapidly gained popularly in the last few days, to the point where just about wherever you live or wherever you look, you can find detailed collaborative drawings, silly graffiti, inside jokes, and more doodled all over the map. And unshockingly, a lot of those doodles are gaming references.

Like most people, I checked out my own city first before exploring wplace more widely. Kansas City is indeed covered with gaming characters. At a glance, I can see several Pokemon, characters from Rain World, Deltarune, OneShot, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Mario, Earthbound, Among Us, Angry Birds, and plenty more can be spotted amid the city’s roadways and rivers. There are also lots of other pop culture icons, like SpongeBob and various Transformers, sprinkled in with political messages, sports team logos, various flags, location-specific graffiti, and other random doodles. Some people just wrote their names.

But KC is far from the most interesting city on wplace. There’s one particular screenshot of Baltimore that’s gone viral that might unfortunately be a bit too crass to share here (you can click here to see, if you want!) But other fun goofs are a little more innocent:

The Undertale and Deltarune fanbases seem to be especially enjoying wplace, as just about every single location I’ve looked at has had an inordinate number of characters from these two games.

Fan-favorite character Spamton is especially common, to the point where people are complaining that it’s not even exciting to see a Spamton drawn near your house, because he’s near everyone’s houses.

But other fanbases are getting in on it too. For instance, Blizzard’s offices in irvine, CA are covered in a giant Heroes of the Storm logo, with various other WoW property art doodled nearby:

Over in the Dragon Age community, fans are a little less positive lately. After the news today that we’re probably never getting a Dragon Age: Origins remaster, some fans have been doodling all over Kirkwall with messages of…protest? General Dragon Age love?

I was admittedly expecting more Silksong nonsense in Adelaide, South Australia where developer Team Cherry’s offices are located, but there is a Knight wearing a top hat and a number of messages written around the city that all say variations of “Silksong Tomorrow”.

Half the fun of wplace is seeing what elaborate doodly mischief people have gotten up to in major cities, but the other half is finding obscure areas where hardly anyone’s drawn anything. If you explore carefully, you can find hidden drawings in Antarctica, or in the middle of various oceans.

If you’re bored or need to kill some time at work, wplace is an excellent way to do just that. You may even be able to add art of your own if the servers are working, which is questionable at any given time. Who knows, you may just be able to find Spamton lurking near your house!