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Gamify the Boston Skyline

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How confident would you be if you had to identify the city’s iconic architecture? This game aims to find out.

A city has its calling card, and it often takes shape through the form of its skyline. One graphic designer, Yoni Alter, has designed a game that colorfully outlines city’s real estate silhouettes from around the world—including Istanbul, Sydney, and Austin—to test your recall of scale and shape.

Boston’s in there, and the structures that made the cut include the Zakim Bridge, Federal Reserve Building, the Hatch Memorial Shell, the Berkeley Building, the Hood Milk Bottle, the State House, First National Bank Building at 100 Federal Street, 111 Huntington Ave, and the John Hancock Tower.

Some may feel that there are some key contenders that should have made the final cut—Citgo sign, where are you? Perhaps Alter knows something of what developer Related Beal has in store for it.

MIT student Adrian Dalca, known for taking one million photos of the skyline in the Boston Timescape Project, feels that the skyline has been relatively slow and steady in its development. Boston Magazine quotes him as saying that the city “doesn’t change as dramatically as other cities, but there’s a little bit of [construction visible] over time.”

Some criticize Boston because it doesn’t have its fill of imposing stretches of structures that scrape the sky, but others recognize a certain charm in the rather low profile of Boston’s buildings.

That’s about to change, of course. Construction hasn’t been this bustling in Boston since the mid-1800’s. Fastforwarding just a bit more to 2020, the city is expected to have new entries that aspire to the skies: Winthrop Square Tower, The Millennium Tower, Four Seasons Hotel & Private Residences at One Dalton Street, One Bromfield, South Station Tower, Copley Place Tower, to name a few.

In any case, whether you’re looking for it or not, the skyline’s going to change. Snapshots of the city will start to look very different, quite soon.