Link: https://hackaday.com/2026/04/28/payphone-tag-is-australias-new-national-sport/

Do payphones count as retro tech? NGL, this sounds really fun.

Australia’s payphones are an iconic part of the national landscape, even if they’re not as important as they once used to be. However, they’re having a resurgence of late, in part thanks to a new national pastime—the sport of Payphone Tag!

Created by [Alex Allchin], the game is simple. To play, you first sign up on the website and get your emoji and 5-digit PIN. You then go out and find a payphone, dial the Payphone Tag number, and enter your PIN when prompted. This lets you “capture” the phone, raising your score in the game. If a phone is already captured, no matter—just head out there, dial the number, and key in your own PIN to steal it. You can also push your score even higher by capturing three payphones in a triangle on the map to get bonus points.

It’s a fun geospatial game that’s also free to play, because Telstra made payphone calls free back in 2022. It might cost you a bit to get out to some phones, but there are plenty you can reach with the aid of free public transport at the moment, anyway. Protip—at the time of writing, there are a ton of easy captures to be had on Kangaroo Island. It might just cost you a pretty penny to get out there. Have at it!

We’d love to see some stats from Telstra as to whether this is making a dent in overall payphone usage rates. In any case, there were 800 players in the last 7 days and a full 36,640 captures so far, so a lot is happening out there. We fully expect to see this concept spread to other nations in turn, though it might be less attractive in places where you still need to dig out a coin to make a call.

Honestly, Australia having free pay phone calls is almost more interesting than the game they are playing with them.

Ya'll still got payphones?

there are a ton of easy captures to be had on Kangaroo Island.

Aww, just came back from there. For what its worth, Kangaroo island isnt that expensive, its suprisingly reasonable for a holiday location. But be aware that its a huge island, everything is a lot larger than i expected.

Telstra is required to provide the payphone network coverage. But it costs more money to physically collect the funds from the phones than its worth, so they just make them free to save the effort. They also have wifi in some of them thats free for telstra subscribers

Legally mandated. Telstra has to maintain the payphone network.

I thkught it was more that they sell money from advertising on the side, but nobody uses them, so instead of having them forcibly removed, they pivoted and claimed it was a public service.

Maybe be a bit of both, but definitely they are required to operate the payphone network:

https://www.acma.gov.au/rules-telstra-payphones