“I’ve never seen a force so powerful to bring people together as Pokémon Go has done.” That’s no overstatement from the founder of the Pokémon Go New York Facebook page. Going by the handle Dankizard, he has borne witness to some of the incredible scenes of Pokémon Go players in New York you may have seen online. The footage of hundreds of players flocking into the park as a Vaporeon spawned there was, for many, the moment where the true scale of Pokémon Go’s impact became clear. This wasn’t some cash-in of a classic brand or a half-measure towards converting classic Nintendo titles to mobile devices. Niantic and The Pokémon Company had hit upon something truly captivating.
And perhaps that should not have been a surprise, but it was. While we like to think we have a firm understanding of the appeal of the Pokémon games there can be no denying that sales had been consistently dropping over the last 20 years following the 59 million copies of Pokémon Red and Blue on the Game Boy. At present it looks like Pokémon Go has even managed to exceed those figures with downloads on iOS and Android (Apple has confirmed that it has already broken iOS week one sales records). We’ve always enjoyed the series, but it was beginning to feel as if only the most hardcore of older fans and a smattering of new players really cared anymore. Pokémon Go has awakened that passion again. Pokémon Go has been a project driven by passion from the beginning. Starting as a 2014 April Fools’ Day joke conceived by Satoru Iwata and The Pokémon Company’s Tsunekazu Ishihara in collaboration with Google, their tease of Pokémon Challenge ignited a mass of interest. Combining the data of Google maps with an augmented reality Pokémon experience was instantly captivating to fans. The trailer for the pretend role of Pokémon Hunter at Google has many of the aspects of Pokémon Go today, with the creatures appearing on screens, throwing Poké Balls to capture them and searching far and wide to catch them all.
As it happened Ishihara also happened to be a big fan of Ingress, Niantic’s augmented reality game made when it was a part of Google and saw the potential of that game to form the template of a similar augmented reality experience for Pokémon. Nintendo’s plan to expand into smartphone titles was in some ways Iwata’s parting masterstroke before he passed away, picked up by Nintendo’s new president Tatsumi Kimishima. But then Nintendo’s first move into the market, Miitomo, didn’t exactly fill us with hope. Thankfully, Pokémon Go using Ingress as a starting point, has proven to be a much smarter integration of smartphone tech and IP than the social networking app.
It rather begs the question, what is it exactly about Pokémon Go that makes it special? “I think it’s the pursuit that brings people together,” says Dankizard. “The pursuit of Pokémon, the pursuit of Gyms, the pursuit to be the very best like no one ever was. Anyone who played Pokémon as a kid, dreamed of it becoming a reality. It’s just about as real as it can get now and millions of people are seeing their childhood dream come true. We all wanted it to happen. And now that it’s here, we feel like we all made it happen collectively.”
There’s certainly something about Pokémon Go that appears to be tapping into the root appeal of the series, perhaps only enhanced by the game using the original 150 Pokémon, bringing back many memories for older fans and giving new players a clean slate from which to learn about this world. In many ways Pokémon Go is a pure interpretation of the ideas that began this series in the first place. “Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri was an avid bug collector as a child, which later lead to being his inspiration for Pokémon,” Lewis Knight, founder of games™’s local Pokémon Go Bournemouth & Poole Facebook group, reminded us. “This is a natural evolution (pardon the pun) of that initial idea. Coupled with the team based competition and the social aspects of being able to compare Pokémon or ask advice on where to catch certain Pokémon. I think this is why it has become so popular and has brought so many people together.”
It’s an important point that Pokémon Go’s appeal isn’t just about the aesthetics of the experience, but the nature of it too. It is a game that demands engagement with the outside world and can easily instigate real world interactions in a way that no other videogame has done, perhaps since the original Pokémon games. Pokémon Go has managed to foster a community almost instantly that wants to meet other players and engage with them.
But before we look more deeply into the social phenomenon of the game, we still need to tackle a larger question about this series; how has it remained so popular after all these years? “I think part of what has kept Pokémon going is the fact that it’s constantly evolving,” is Joe Merrick’s assessment. Merrick is the webmaster and founder of the long-running Pokémon fansite serebii.net, started way back in 1999. “There are new elements added with each iteration, new Pokémon, and even with the spinoff games lots of new ideas keep being brought in that make the series fascinating.”
For Steve Black Jr, host of the world’s most popular Pokémon podcast, It’s Super Effective, the appeal is very simple. “Speaking for myself, Pokémon really hits home with me because of the collecting. I’m the person that needs all the seasons of a TV show, or all the albums from a certain music artist, or all the hidden items in a video game. I just like to collect things and Pokémon scratches that itch. On top of that, Pokémon have really strong designs, names, and lore behind them, which just builds on top of the collection aspect. At the end of the day, Pokémon has something for everyone. You could be into the anime or the completive battling or the card game or the spin-off games (like Pokémon Snap) or just the collecting aspect. I can tell you right now, everyone playing Pokémon Go is really sold on the collecting aspect, which is just fantastic to see.”
There has always been an element of hoarding to the series that has kept us playing, as the famous catch phrase for the game became a mantra for fans, we had to catch ‘em all. It’s that same impulse that has seen us chase after Achievements and Trophies on Xbox and PlayStation consoles or find every Easter egg in a new Rockstar game. Most gamers have a completionist element to their personalities that demands to be satisfied and even if we never quite get to achieve our goal, the journey there, the struggle to complete an experience, is often the thing we enjoy most about it anyway.
The next logical question though is who exactly is playing Pokémon Go? Is it just fans of the series from the last 20 years, many of whom are returning or are new players being drawn in by this refreshed and reset experience? Merrick thinks a lot of it is lapsed fans of the game. “From what we can see, the largest part of the fans of Go are people who weren’t really still into Pokémon. There’s an element of it hitting the curiosity of people who played it back in the Nineties when they were younger and hitting that nostalgia element.”
“From walking around different cities and overhearing conversations, you have a mixture of Pokémon and non- Pokémon fans playing,” says Black Jr. “My sister for example fell off after Red/Blue, but now she’s playing Go and she’s excited that she knows most of the Pokémon she runs into. The game right now is more of a social experience built around collecting monsters. I’m sure some care or get excited when they see a certain Pokémon, but others just want to catch them all and they won’t bother to learn the names; both are acceptable ways to play. That being said, I hope that new Pokémon and/or features being added keep these players. Pokémon fans aren’t going anywhere, but I think it’s important for Niantic and The Pokémon Company to capture and convince players to actually become fans outside of Go. Hopefully my podcast can help with this too.”
The level of engagement so far would suggest that Pokémon Go isn’t going anywhere soon. Helped in part by its release in the summer season for the Northern Hemisphere, players are flocking to PokéStops and Gyms, hanging out together in parks and as we’ve found speaking with Dankizard and Lewis Knight, making new friendships through social media groups setting up events and meet-ups. One of the more spectacular of these was of course that video from Central Park in New York City we mentioned earlier. It’s a small snippet of footage that speaks to a wider movement both in that city and beyond.
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