A decade later, Pokémon Go finally made good on its original promise

Summary

Players celebrated the game’s 10th anniversary by jumping Mewtwo as a community. Players celebrated the game’s 10th anniversary by jumping Mewtwo as a community. When Niantic dropped the first Pokémon Go trailer in 2015, it was hard to grasp how a bunch of players could work together to catch a pokémon like Mewtwo. But this week at the game’s 10th anniversary event in New York City, Pokémon Go showed the world how it’s done. Almost 2,000 players (many of them Pokémon Go influencers) packed into Times Square on Thursday evening to participate in a special battle. It was cool to see Times Square briefly go dark before the billboards began lighting up, revealing an escaped Mewtwo Mega Evolving, and it was even wilder to see people living the fantasy depicted in the game’s first trailer. Even though most people had never played a mobile game like Pokémon Go when the game debuted in 2016, the trailer made the general idea easy enough to understand. Players were meant to go out into the world, and the game would tell them where they might be able to find wild, catchable monsters if they could get to a specific area fast enough. The trailer made gameplay seem like it could be a chill, solitary experience, but it also featured wild shots of crowds teaming up to take down powerful pokémon. Raids hadn’t been introduced to the game at that point, but it was clear that Niantic had plans to make things like catching legendaries feel special. In a press release, Scopely — which acquired Niantic’s games business last year — VP of product Michael Steranka explained that the recent anniversary event was the company’s way of living up to that first trailer. “When we first dreamt what Pokémon GO might become a decade ago, hosting more than a thousand people in a single, local raid battle was just a pipe dream,” Steranka wrote. “Seeing that vision become a reality in Times Square was the perfect way to celebrate 10 years of playing together with our community.” This latest in-person event was a far cry from the game’s first in 2017 , when thousands of players descended upon Chicago only to find their poké-plans scuttled by network overloads and software issues that Niantic took ultimately credit for .