9 Years Ago Today, Nintendo Forced Gamers to Touch Grass

Pokémon GO took the world by storm, and seemed to come out of left field, and it’s hard to believe that the game has been out for nearly a decade! There are still a huge number of people playing the game today, though, of course, nothing like the game at its peak.

Like so many people, I’m also a lapsed player, so I thought it would be interesting to take a look back on the game’s 9th anniversary (I’m weird like that) to see just what made it so special, and how it actually got me in to Pokemon in the first place.

The Strange Origins of Pokémon Go

Nintendo isn’t in the habit of of putting its intellectual property on platforms it doesn’t own, and yes I know the Pokemon Company is its own thing, but it’s one third of the partnership that controls the IP, and so far it’s been mostly a Nintendo gaming franchise.

Nintendo did dabble a bit in third-party licensing, most notoriously when they allowed Zelda and Mario onto the Philips CD-i.

Woof. Anyway, Nintendo would later release some mobile games, such as Super Mario Run, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. However, just months before Super Mario Run, we saw Pokémon GO hit mobile stores all over the world, and the game started as an April Fools’ joke.

Back in 2014, the late, great Satoru Iwata alongside Tsunekazu Ishihara (of the Pokémon Company) came up with an idea called Google Maps: Pokemon Challenge in collaboration with Google for the silly day in question. Google has a subsidiary called Niantic, and this developer has a game called Ingress. If you look at Ingress you’ll see all the bones of Pokémon GO, and Ishihara thought that the game’s design would work well for Pokémon.

Obviously, they thought the idea was worth more effort than just a prank, so over the next few years (after Iwata had sadly passed away) the different stakeholders collaborated and gave us what’s known as Pokémon GO today.

When It Caught Fire

On the sixth of July 2016, after a lengthy beta period that ended about a week prior, the game was out and within days it had become a phenomenon. It was in the news, it was on everybody’s phone, and you could see people playing it everywhere.

Of course, just like Ingress, what made Pokémon GO different from most other games was that you had to go out in the world physically to play it. While you might catch a few Pokémon in your backyard, if you wanted to get the best ones, and if you wanted to battle it out at Pokémon gyms, you’d have to leave the house.

The best thing for me, at the time, was meeting people and discovering that folks I’d least expected to play the game were totally into it. While it was probably all the media hype around the strangeness of it all, it really did feel like every person and their dog were walking around trying to get a rare Snorlax.

The Health and Safety Side Quests

Pokémon GO was a bit of a double-edged sword. For a lot of less-than-healthy nerds like yours-truly, the game made me go outside, catch some sun, and actually get some steps in. I worked as a junior staff member on a huge university campus at the time, and since I was always late for work, I had to walk about a mile from my parking spot to my office, and it was way more fun with the potential of catching some Pokémon.

Even after work, my wife and I would go to the nearest park like some weird pair of outdoorsy people, and we weren’t the only ones! So, overall, this was of benefit to people’s health, but the other thing about the world outside your house is that almost all the dangerous stuff lives there.

So Pokémon GO also had some people engage in dangerous behavior. Of course, the game itself reminded you that you have to be vigilant about your environment, and it’s hardly the game’s fault. Still, people being who they are, you got folks trespassing, walking into traffic, falling off things because they weren’t paying attention, and just generally being a danger to themselves and others.

YouTube is filled with “fail” compilations of people getting hurt while playing, and authorities all over the world had to issue statements and tighten up public safety.

A Game That Couldn’t Evolve Fast Enough

While Pokémon GO exploded in popularity at first, players quickly realized that there wasn’t much to this game. Basic features were missing at launch, and, of course, the actual servers were under immense strain at first, because clearly neither Niantic nor any of the other stakeholders in the game had any inkling it would be such a huge success.

Fanatic players quickly ran out of things to do, and the developer was scrambling to meet demand for options like PvP Pokémon battles, which, come on, that’s literally the whole premise of Pokémon.

So while the game was almost too hot to handle at first, things cooled off a bit as people hit the limits of the content. All that good stuff was still coming, but I can only imagine how truly enormous the game could have been if it was more feature-complete at launch.

The Pandemic Pivot and Second Wind

When the 2019 pandemic hit, you’d think a game based on getting people outside and interacting would die a quick death. However, Niantic pivoted quickly to make the game pandemic-friendly.

The company released a “Play Where You Are” advisory, which you can still see using the Wayback Machine, which modified gameplay to make things safe during COVID. Mainly, mechanics were buffed so that things happened faster, lasted longer, or dropped items more often.

Pokémon will appear more often, and you’d have no trouble catching a few in your own backyard. Gyms were also doubled in footprint, so that more people could participate in battles from their homes. The end result is that, for many people, Pokémon GO was actually one way to keep their sanity during lockdown.

Where Pokémon Go Is Now?

While you don’t see breathless news stories about the game or park stampedes anymore, Pokémon GO is still going strong. I think the game is now what Niantic intended it to be all along—a casual experience with a smaller, dedicated fanbase.

While I couldn’t find any truly trustworthy numbers, a live count kept by activeplayer.io shows that around 127 million people actively took part in the game in the 30-day windows before I wrote these words. That’s a lot of players, and more than enough to sustain a game like Pokémon GO for many years. After all, as long as there are new events, new mechanics, and new Pokémon, the train can keep rolling indefinitely.

Since there’s always a new mainline Pokémon game around the corner to tie in with, I think Pokémon GO will probably be a round for a long time yet.

The Legacy Pokémon Go Left Behind

Pokemon GO is a pioneering game for many different reasons. Niantic and its partners may not have expected a smash hit, but they still innovated plenty when it came to technologies like Augmented Reality, and massive cooperative multiplayer games between people who are basically just living their lives. It was always cool to run into another player during your day, and I have a feeling that the game was the start of many friendships.

For me, Pokémon GO was special for a few reasons. First, it was something that my wife and I did together. Sometimes after dinner, we’d just get in the car and cruise around the neighborhood catching Pokémon.

Maybe most importantly, Pokémon GO was what got me into Pokémon as a whole. I never really tried the mainline franchise, but after we got a little bored with Pokémon GO, I bought a pair of Nintendo 2DS consoles—the special edition Pokémon ones, and we both played through Pokémon Red and Blue together. Since then, we’ve played every mainline Pokémon game excluding Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.

Buying a 2DS then introduced me to Fire Emblem, and that’s probably the biggest reason I bought a New 3DS XL (or LL, depending on where you live) and later a Nintendo Switch, and now Switch 2. I wouldn’t be shocked if this little April Fools game ended up causing a similar situation for many people around the world, and shored up Nintendo’s bottom line in numerous, indirect ways.

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So, while I’m unlikely to go back to Pokémon GO myself, I hope it takes at least another nine years in it!