A city you can read like a game map.
Pixel Melbourne draws inner Melbourne as an isometric pixel world — every building extruded from real footprints, every street with its real lane markings, and every business sitting inside the building it actually occupies. No aerial photos, no generic pins: a hand-built map engine renders the city the way a strategy game would.
The city, counted
What's on the map
The coverage is built around where the buildings and the businesses actually are — the dense inner city, not a council boundary. That means the Hoddle Grid and Southbank's towers, Docklands, the terrace streets of Carlton, Fitzroy and Collingwood, Richmond, South Yarra and Prahran, South Melbourne, St Kilda, Brunswick and Footscray. The same engine that places every cafe in its building draws the city's other layers too — transport, parks, playgrounds, public toilets, EV chargers and more. Flick the layers on the live map.
Built from open data, openly
Everything on the map has a public, checkable source — and each card says where its facts came from and when they were last synced.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
Why isometric?
Because cities are three-dimensional, and lists aren't. On Pixel Melbourne a fourteen-storey tower full of businesses looks like a fourteen-storey tower — the ×N badge tells you how much is inside, and one click opens the whole building. Cafes cluster where they actually cluster. The map is the interface.
Who builds this
Pixel Melbourne is built by Grigory Frolov — a web developer and digital marketing specialist with twenty years behind the keyboard, writing about the city on the blog the way the map sees it. Questions or ideas? Get in touch.
Run a Melbourne business?
Your business is very likely already on the map. Claiming it is free and takes about a minute: click the verification link we email to your business's publicly listed address, or add our badge to your website — no passwords, no forms either way. Verified owners get the green badge, a photo gallery, opening hours, links, and priority placement across the site.
Claim your business — freeSpotted something wrong?
Every listing has a “Spotted an error?” link — corrections go to a human moderator, and fixes flow back through the open datasets so everyone benefits, not just this site. For anything else: send us a message.