Pokémon GO is not a development of Nintendo, but a company owned by them, Google and The Pokémon Company
they look like zombies controlled by a higher intelligence through your phone.
But are players Pokémon GO , the video game for mobile interacts with the real world and became a viral phenomenon since its launch on Wednesday in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. So much so that the creators decided to halt its publication in the UK and the Netherlands until they can increase the capacity of its overloaded servers.
The overwhelming success of the game surprised his developer Niantic Labs , but there are several ingredients that explain it:
- Use very popular brand for years as Pokémon <. / li>
- incorporates augmented reality , one of consumer technologies on full blast.
- It has financial support from two tech giants, Google and Nintendo .
- it is a project that descends in direct line from Google Earth and Google Maps and a popular game among the geeks , Ingress , which inherited a virtual “infrastructure”.
- … and, apparently, the game is fun (to a man about to be a father could not help playing with his laboring wife.)
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The story behind Pokémon GO
Niantic Labs, which developed the game for Nintendo, was part of the empire Google until last year, when is independent after the Mountain View giant announced the creation of its own parent company, Alphabet .
Last October, the developer grossed $ 20 million in investments of the three big players in this story, Nintendo, Google and The Pokémon Company . The language of the press release, as often happens in these cases, may have sounded bombastic and exaggerated, but after what happened this week seems prescient.
“The strategic investment of Pokémon in Niantic prepares the way for mobile social experience in which the world has never seen before, “said there Tsunekazu Ishihara, President of the Pokémon Company.
Although this is not the first game that uses augmented reality in public spaces, Ishihara was certainly right. The world had not seen an impact as big as what happened these days in the streets of cities across the country, including the first crimes against game users .
Revenge of the nerds
Niantic already had experience in the field of augmented reality. He had developed Ingress , another game that incorporated several elements now popularized by Pokémon GO, with which he achieved 13 million downloads.
“A few years ago he wrote Jimmy Guterman , editor of the publication specializing in disruptive startups NewCo Shift – it was easy to mock the nerds who used Ingress an augmented reality game that was cumbersome and only worked in Android, the platform that avoided the boys cool. Now the butt of the joke is us. “
Especially because much of the” gyms “today visiting players new game to” train “their characters were suggested Ingress by users as “portals”. She told Niantic CEO John Hanke site Mashable, the company used the database of the first game to build the second.
“we basically had two and a half years when people went to all the places where I thought I had to be able to play Ingress, so there is quite remote places Hanke- said. There are portals in Antarctica and the North Pole and most places in between. “
A veteran of digital maps
Hanke works on linking the real world with the digital for more than 15 years ago. In 2000, he founded the startup geospatial visualization Keyhole, with funding from investors such as Sony and intelligence agency CIA, as the database Crunchbase . In 2004, Google bought the company and its technology became part of the product of satellite images Google Earth and Map Google Maps .
Hanke stayed in the Mountain View company until last year, when Niantic independence.
This executive is not the first nor the only one to try to create such addictive experience as GO Pokémon based on augmented reality, which means adding digital elements to the real world through which the user.
The venture capitalist Fred Wilson says many entrepreneurs to him the idea of a game of this nature.
“When my daughter told me to unload Pokémon GO and play, I realized immediately that were spot on with something no one had done before – relates in his blog -. I always loved the idea that we could do a search for the mass public treasure using the web and mobile. But it took more than ten years since I saw this idea for the first time to really happen. “
The difference may be that the game involves a mark and a popular narrative for generation millennial , as are Pokémon and characters. “The Pokémon (…) brand,” says David Byttow, CEO of the startup Bold , “instantly creates a common language many of us we understand “.
And, of course, but Niantic has been separated from Google, having it as an investor means a good relationship with the leader in digital maps of much of the world company.
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