WTF Is ‘Pokémon Go,’ Explained
How did all this get started?
The idea for the game was conceived in 2013 by the late Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo, and Tsunekazu Ishihara of the Pokémon Company as an April Fools’ Day collaboration with Google called the Pokémon Challenge. Revealed with a slick trailer on YouTube (which has since been viewed over 17 million times), the “joke” launched a fake competition to find 150 Pokémon hidden in real world locations. The trailer showed participants holding up their phones to reveal the creatures through the device’s camera. Little did we know at the time that this would be the premise for the real game launched three years later.
How did it get so huge, so fast?
The game was originally supposed to be rolled out around the world starting in Australia on July 6th, and then it would launch in North America, before moving west to Europe and finally Asia. Things didn’t quite go according to plan though. By the time the game was turned on in North America, demand was so high that it made the game’s servers grind to a halt causing all kinds of problems. The game debuted at Number One on both iPhone and Android, and there were so many people trying to play it that the system struggled. Lots of players found that they couldn’t log in, or if they did, the game would freeze and crash. As a result, the global rollout was paused while things were fixed, which is on set for this week.
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WTF Is ‘Pokémon Go,’ Explained, Page 2 of 2