Pokémon Go

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2016 · Niantic mobile game for iOS and Android, first released in the United States, Australia and New Zealand · Also known as Pokémon GO; Pokemon Go; PoGo

What it is

A game for mobile phones, released in 2016, that showed a map of the real world on the screen. Small cartoon creatures called Pokémon, from a Japanese video game and cartoon series popular since the 1990s, appeared at real places. To catch one you had to physically walk there, then flick a ball at it with your finger. Real landmarks such as churches, statues and murals became stops where you collected items, and some became 'gyms' where teams fought for control.

Where it came from

Niantic, a company that began inside Google, made it with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. The map of stops and gyms came from Niantic's earlier game Ingress, whose players had been submitting interesting locations for years. A 2014 April Fools' joke on Google Maps, where people hunted Pokémon on the map, is often cited as the starting idea. It launched on 6 July 2016 and spread country by country over the following weeks, with its servers repeatedly crashing under the load. Within weeks it was among the most downloaded apps ever.

How people used it

People walked. Crowds gathered in parks at night when word got round that a rare creature had appeared, and a video of people running across Central Park in New York for a Vaporeon was shared widely. Players joined one of three teams (red Valor, blue Mystic, yellow Instinct) and argued about which was best. Shops and bars paid for in-game 'lures' to bring players to their doors. Eggs only hatched after you'd walked a set distance, so people strapped their phones to ceiling fans, record players and dogs. Screenshots of creatures in odd places, on a toilet or a friend's head, were posted everywhere.

Why it mattered

For one summer it got people who'd normally sit indoors walking for hours and talking to strangers who were looking at the same screen. It also showed what goes wrong when a game sends people to real places: players walked into traffic and two men fell off a cliff in California, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Arlington National Cemetery asked people to stop playing there. Some governments restricted it. Most players had dropped off by autumn, but a core kept going, and the game was still running events and earning money years later.

The jokes around it

• "Pokémon Go to the polls": Hillary Clinton's line at a July 2016 rally, mocked as a politician chasing a trend.
• Team Instinct as the smallest, least respected team, with its leader Spark treated as a lovable loser.
• "Another Pidgey": the most common, least wanted creatures (Pidgey, Rattata, Zubat) turning up on every street.
• The broken paw print tracker, meant to show how close a creature was, which barely worked at launch.
• Pokémon Go Fest in Chicago, July 2017, where the servers failed and the crowd booed the company on stage.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People will leave the house in huge numbers if their phone gives them a reason to. For a few weeks the internet was something you did with your legs in public, and it quickly put crowds in places that never asked for them, like memorials and private gardens.

What noah is not sure of

How directly the 2014 Google Maps April Fools' joke led to the game is told in different ways. Download and revenue figures come from the specimen and analytics firms' estimates. The 2025 sale of the game to Scopely is taken from the specimen text.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.