10 Years Ago, Pokémon Go Forced You to Meet Your Neighbor
10 Years Ago, Pokémon Go Forced You to Meet Your Neighbor
Pokémon Go is a decade old and still going strong, though we do miss one thing from the simpler times.
If, for some reason, you still dismissed Pokémon as a fad by 2016, that perception was surely blown out of the water when Pokémon Go hit the App Store 10 years ago this month. The ensuing frenzy of digital monster-nabbing proved Pokémon's cross-generational popularity once and for all.
Pokémon Go, which lets you "catch" pokémon that pop up in real-world locations with the help of your phone camera and augmented reality (AR), started as an April Fool's joke at Google in 2014. Engineers invited people to find and catch pokémon across Google Maps. Snorlax was famously found at the Vatican.
The energy behind the Google Map game exploded a hundredfold when studio Niantic spun off from Google and launched the Pokémon Go we still play today. Even then we lived in a world of high-energy fads fueled by social media-driven FOMO, and Pokémon Go hit 2016 like a Graveller driving a truck. For a solid month, everyone was on the streets, sweltering under the summer sun and sweating through the humid summer nights, looking for elusive pokémon. The programming was pretty rough in those days, so some nights you could expect to see your streets clogged with nothing but Drowzees or Pidgeys. And if someone guarded a Gym with a Blissey, it was better to go home instead of bothering to chip away at the grinning pink punk.
But early Pokémon Go wasn't just about walking, sweating, and dying (virtually) in the service of finding that Cubone that was rumored to spawn in the parking lot of your decrepit childhood mall. It was about strangers excitedly chatting with each other about their neighborhoods and the imaginary creatures that now swarmed it. It was about the entire world going on the Pokémon journey we all dreamed about, or still dream about, as kids. Pokémon is a commercial product, of course, but it's managed to penetrate every fiber of pop culture and has since become something more. We cling to our favorite creatures like totems. We walk miles to find them, seal them in AR balls. Pokémon might be special.
Pokémon's enduring charm and popularity has kept Pokémon Go thriving, too. There are always new in-game events, new city-wide gatherings to find special pokémon. Not very long ago over 1000 people gathered in Times Square to "catch" Mewtwo, an homage to Pokémon Go's first trailer.
The original 151 pokémon have had their numbers increased nearly tenfold with the addition of creatures from different games. There are sign-in bonuses, tournaments, monthly passes, and the rest of it. It's a bit much for those of us who started playing on those sparse summer nights ten years ago, but the nice thing about Pokémon Go is that the sheer fun of finding, catching, and recording the pokémon you find is still easy to do even if you don't want to mess with the extra stuff. It's still a ton of fun to go to a sporting event, open Pokémon Go, and witness a veritable field of pink pokémon lures laid down by altruistic players who maybe don't care so much about the disaster of a ball game going on below them. Raids are plentiful at these impromptu gatherings, and you can net yourself a Legendary to the accompaniment of a live My Chemical Romance concert.
Pokémon Go's glow-up is undeniable, and its continued success is understandable. That said, it's still easy to get nostalgic for the way everyone became best friends for a few weeks in 2016—a sentiment that has sadly not carried over from Pokémon Go's explosive start.