I know what you did this summer.
You stalked the streets with your iPhone at eye level, seeking Doduos, Psyducks, and Bulbasaurs. You walked billions of miles seeking funny creatures who, it turns out, live among us! But they could only be perceived through the screen of your mobile phone. You gravitated to locations where those creatures bred and you could acquire magic balls to toss at them. Some of you “trained” your captured creatures in “gyms” located around the world. Those gyms, too, could only be detected if you were looking through your phone, suddenly a window into a shadow world containing a menagerie of characters who had somehow escaped from lunch boxes and trading cards, appearing outside of subway entrances, schools, and plaques commemorating obscure historical events.
To say you were obsessed is an understatement. You concentrated on the game with such abandon that thousands of you endangered yourselves, walking into trees, falling off 90-foot oceanside cliffs, and getting lost in caves. You wandered into restricted areas of nuclear power plants. The State Department’s top spokesperson lectured one of you for chasing critters during a press conference. When a rare creature called a Vaporeon appeared in New York’s Central Park in the middle of the night, hundreds of you literally stampeded in an attempt to snare it. The White House press secretary said that “legitimate security questions…have been raised about the game.”
In the process you explored your surroundings, and set out to hunt in more distant realms where you seldom ventured. You got some fresh air. And you became comfortable with the idea that digital creatures live among us, even if they don’t exist. Because they kind of do. Yes, in some sense your life became the silliest musical number from the 1960s movie version of Mary Poppins. But you became primed for more serious interminglings of the virtual and physical worlds, a reality mix that may one day become ubiquitous.
Yes, you were playing Pokémon Go.
Introduced on July 6 by a then-obscure company called Niantic, Pokémon Go saw the most insane, huge adoption of a mobile game—ever. Well before summer’s end, 500 million people had downloaded it, rocketing the free app to the top of Apple and Android stores, and suddenly turning it into the center of people’s daily lives. Though “augmented reality” was still an ominous buzzword in the tech world — with Microsoft showing an early prototype, Facebook and Apple rumored to be working on it, and a mysterious company in Florida struggling to set a launch date for a system it says will rule them all — Pokémon Go made it happen now, inviting the popular 1990s dramatis personae of the Japanese card game to share our world with us and daring us to capture them by tossing virtual beach balls at them.
You may not be still playing—the Beatles-esque hysteria around Pokémon Go inevitably subsided, like a summer romance when the leaves start falling — but plenty of people are still in the game, and recent updates strive to draw back some of the dropouts. At the end of the year, Niantic released statistics claiming that users walked 8.7 billion kilometers (5.4 billion miles) while snaring 88 billion Pokémon critters.
But it isn’t the number of people who downloaded the app and made themselves look like idiots while flipping Pokéballs at imaginary creatures that led Backchannel to choose Pokémon Go—along with Niantic and its founder and CEO John Hanke—as the recipient of our first annual Big Idea award. Though clearly the gaming phenomenon of the year, Pokémon Go is more than a fad, more than a game, and more than an app. It is a harbinger of a future where reality is malleable, where the physical world has more annotations than Infinite Jest, and where computer-coded apparitions intrude in the firmament to entertain, inform, and alter our behavior.
In 2016, Pokémon Go not only got us out of the house; it also bent time and space and ripped the veil of reality that separates the soft from the actual, bits from atoms, virtual from formerly-known-as-real. But Backchannel’s Big Idea of this year was in no way an overnight phenomenon. Instead, it is a landmark on a long path with multiple origins. It involved the imaginations of science fiction writers and philosophers; the work of hundreds of engineers over more than a decade; the photographs from satellites in the sky; and, ultimately, the vision of a Texas-born entrepreneur who, as a boy, obsessively paged through copies of National Geographic, desperate to expand his world.
If we were making a movie of the Pokémon Go story, we would start it on a different map than the one that appears when you fire up the Pokémon Go app. Picture a crinkled, fold-out, faded broadsheet that you might once have purchased off a dusty shelf in a gas station off an endless two-lane state highway. It’s a map of Texas, and somewhere in the center of this vast pastel expanse is Cross Plains, a town of around 1,000.
It’s where Niantic CEO John Hanke grew up, a child consumed by geography and bits, unwittingly pursuing a path that would spring open new dimensions for hundreds of millions of Poké-people. “There’s a blinking red light and a Dairy Queen,” says Hanke of his birthplace. “It’s that town.”
Because “every place else seemed more interesting to me,” he had a hunger to learn about distant locales, fueled in part by a neighbor who brought grocery bags full of pristine National Geographic magazines. “That was a go-to source of entertainment for me,” he says. “I would spend hours going through those, pulling out the maps, looking at the photos of Mars and all the stuff there.” He got computer fever in his early teens, playing games and then learning programming on his Atari home computer. But in college — he entered a small honors student program at the University of Texas at Austin — “I put the technology stuff aside to learn about literature and history, things that smart people seemed to know about.”
After graduation, Hanke worked at a series of places, developing a worldview and a series of products that each seemed a step toward Niantic and Pokémon Go.
First, he worked for the State Department, finally getting a chance to see the world. He was posted to Burma during a turbulent political period, and after three years left government for business school in Berkeley. His application essay was about one of his idols, Trip Hawkins, a PC game industry pioneer who had recently started 3DO, a 3D gaming company. “I was thinking about how we could build apps to experience worlds like the ancient temples I’d seen in Burma,” says Hanke. After his MBA, he started a company with some classmates: the product was a multiplayer game called Meridian 59, one of the first MMOs — a massively multiplayer online game. In 1996. Hanke and his partners sold the company — to 3DO.Eventually over 50,000 users got hooked on the game.
After starting and selling another game company, Hanke met some smart ex-Silicon Graphics (SGI) engineers who had started a company called Intrinsic Graphics, which built tools to help game developers publish on multiple game systems. (They included Brian McClendon, now Uber’s head of maps; and Michael Jones, who for years was Google’s chief technology advocate.) In a display of programming virtuosity, Intrinsic had essentially recreated — on a lowly PC — a famous SGI 3D graphics demo called Space to Face. It featured a high resolution image of globe that you could zoom in on and see pieces of the earth from satellite graphics. The Intrinsic team asked Hanke if he had any ideas how to build on that demo. They had asked the right person. Soon the team was forging partnerships with companies selling high-resolution satellite information, which had only recently been commercially available.
“We had this notion of building a super MapQuest,” says Hanke. “If you could pull together all the imagery data, map data, and business data, you could have a game-like 3D interface to the world.” What’s more, using that technology you could layer information over visual representations, to create a supercharged presence, unearthing historical events or providing information about what businesses or landmarks existed in the geolocations you zoomed into. “It opened up a whole new set of uses,” says Hanke, “Sort of like teleportation. You could suddenly get data about a place without having to be there.”
They called the company Keyhole. Two books served as philosophic foundations: David Gelernter’s Mirror Worlds, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The former, by a distinguished computer scientist, is an under-appreciated tome that outlines how the physical world will ultimately be linked to a digital duplicate with rich layers of information tied to its locations and artifacts. Sci-fi writer Stephenson’s classic novel is a groundbreaking depiction of a virtual reality realm where people immerse themselves in alternate lives.
The first big customers were TV news operations who would use the software to zoom from space into the location of a news story. It added pizzazz to newscasts. But in 2004, when Google co-founder Sergey Brin saw the product, he quickly offered to buy the company. Hanke and his partners accepted. “Probably the only way that we could have realized our original, very grandiose vision was with the support of Google,” he says now.
In the years that followed, Hanke developed a successor to Keyhole called Google Earth, then slowly integrated it with a sister project, Google Maps. With a click of a mouse you could toggle between the map-like digital representation of a location and the photographic capture of the real thing. Because Google Maps had an open API that welcomed people to add layers of information to the map, the digital representation of a place became in some senses a richer version of a geographic location than the real thing. Applications like Yelp, Flickr, and Uber poured their reviews, pictures, and driver whereabouts over local maps. Endless data mashups transformed maps into geo-infographics.
Google was building a mirror world. In 1931 the Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski declared, “The map is not the territory.” But maps are a territory — and by augmenting them with the geo-related information tagged to location, the primacy of physical location faces a challenge. Maybe “the” territory is actually a piece of earth augmented by all the information related to it.
In short, Google Maps and similar products were augmenting reality, and the implications fascinated Hanke. “Your reality became augmented with a vast digital library that increases your ability to appreciate what’s in front of you.” He wanted to go farther along that path.
But to do so, Hanke would have to leave the Google Maps division and start up a new company. In 2010, Google’s executives convinced him to at least start his venture inside the corporate mothership, committing to a period as an “autonomous unit.” Hanke called his unit Niantic, after a whaling vessel that delivered treasure-seekers to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. Abandoned in 1849, its remains were hauled inland for use as a hotel, until it burned some years later. As the land use at its downtown location evolved, excavators would periodically rediscover the Niantic, most recently in 1978, when a cache of champagne was found in the remaining shards of its hull. (According to Wikipedia, “a portion of the bow remains undisturbed under a parking lot.”)
The company’s motto was “Adventures on Foot,” something it vivified with its first product. Called Field Trip, the app notified you about important information (and sometimes weird trivia) about your surroundings. It could be an obscure historical marker, a former home of a famous writer, a movie scene filmed nearby, or simply the local post office or zoo. But as you moved around, Field Trip would clue you in on the past and present of your location. Essentially, Field Trip users engaged in a form of time travel. Just as digging crews kept re-discovering old San Francisco each time they uncovered the Niantic’s subterranean remains, Field Trip could turn a 21st century street corner into a journey through the decades, exposing a past that was lurking there all along.
Field Trip also rewarded efforts to leave the desktop and explore the streets. “Even in those early days, there was this attempt to get people to move more,” says Niantic’s director of visual and interaction design Dennis Hwang, who moved from the Google Doodle team to Niantic in 2011.
“It didn’t go viral,” says Hanke, of Field Trip. “I love it, and you can still download it. But it was like a nerdy PBS show for people.”
Field Trip also helped organize a fantastic database of information about locations — museums, public buildings, historical markers, odd landmarks, and other geo-factoids linked to a GPS spot. Many of those were so subtle that even residents of a neighborhood didn’t know they were there. “We started thinking, what’s a more sticky mechanism to use?” says Hwang. “Could we do something using game dynamics?
The answer to that question was Ingress. Niantic hired a game and screenwriter named Flint Dille, who helped concoct a convoluted scenario with elements of spy novels and the Risk board game. “It was a strange idea of marrying a science fiction-themed game with public artwork and historical markers,” Hanke says. His not-so-hidden agenda, of course, was advancing his go-outside-and-play philosophy and his passion for local exploration. Laid out on a map grid familiar to any Pokémon Go player, it also used augmented reality; glowing “portals” appearing at certain landmarks were keys to advancing in the game.
The Ingress experience found a cult of devoted players, many of whom are still active. But it will mainly be remembered as proof of concept for a geo-based, time-traveling, augmented reality mobile game that was to come.
The marriage of the Pokémon franchise and the geographic, augmented-reality platform built with Ingress was spurred by an April Fool’s joke. Tatsuo Nomura, an engineer on Google Maps, had worked on previous April Fool’s projects involving 8-bit video games and a Google Maps treasure hunt. As a Pokémon fan since boyhood, Nomura lit on the idea to do a game based on those characters. On a trip to Japan, he got permission from The Pokémon Company, and in April 2014 Google’s Pokémon Challenge went live, layering characters on top of Google Maps and inviting people to capture them with Pokéballs.
Unbeknownst to Nomura, Niantic had already been exploring a Pokémon project. But the April Fool’s stunt made it obvious that mapping a Pokémon game onto the Niantic platform would be a huge success. Hanke contacted Nomura, who in turn went back to Japan to visit The Pokémon Company, introducing its executives to Ingress. “They had just started a mobile division, so it was the right timing,” he says. But he left Japan without assurances. “Their reaction was neutral — I couldn’t tell whether they were excited or confused,” he says. It was definitely the former: Pokémon CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara was a player who had reached Ingress’ Level 8, at the time the highest distinction. “I think they understood the idea,” says Nomura, who joined Niantic soon afterwards.
Still, you do not secure the rights to use Pokémon’s precious intellectual property by the promise of dollars alone: it requires an elaborate cultural courtship. The Pokémon Company is an entity formed by three interlocked firms with a serious financial commitment to Picachus and Pidgeottos: Game Freak, Creatures, and Nintendo. Besides The Pokémon Company itself, the most important to Niantic was Nintendo, which as a gaming company had expertise and self interest in any digital activities involving the character set. Ultimately, Hanke found himself in Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters presenting to its legendary leader, Satoru Iwata, a life-long gamer who had revived the company by focusing on family-friendly games and the popular Nintendo Wii.
To Hanke, Iwata-san was a charming yet commanding figure in a three-piece suit, almost like a character in a video game representing a wise professor. “He was a programmer back in the day, so he had that mentality, but combined with this very personable, grandfatherly, professorial kind of personality,” says Hanke. (What Hanke didn’t know was that Iwata, at 55, was terminally ill.) Hanke explained that Niantic’s goal was to create a family-oriented social experience that helped people connect with each other and the real world. To everyone’s relief, Iwata blessed the vision, remarking that Nintendo shared the same values.
At that point Niantic was at a decision point. Google was splitting into different units under Larry Page’s Alphabet scheme. Hanke and his team decided to break off as an independent unit. They began setting up a structure where Google, Nintendo, and Pokémon would fund Niantic and receive ownership stakes — a process that became more complicated when Iwata died in the summer of 2015. But the negotiations were successful. Meanwhile, Niantic was creating a game based on Pokémon.
Pokémon Go is basically an iteration of the platform Hanke has been building for decades, specifically an iteration of Ingress. Ingress players had been able to submit locations to augment the historical and public spaces from Field Trip; after a review, Niantic would integrate them into the game. “That was what we used to seed Pokémon Go,” says Hanke. “Those are responsible for the locations of the gyms and Pokéstops, and we also use them as it relates to where Pokémon spawn, along with other data that shows where public parks are, and beaches. Again, places that are available for the public to go and utilize. We also use ecological data, in terms of the land type and the ecological makeup to align things around different species. We put water types of Pokémon next to water, and rock type Pokémon in the mountains.”
Introducing Pokémon characters was relatively easy. But fortifying the game for a larger user base was a tough task — it turned out that even rewriting the code base to accommodate masses wouldn’t be enough to handle the masses that showed up when the mobile app dropped in early July.
“We thought it would be a popular game, because Pokémon’s been around for 20 years,” says Hanke. But he felt that younger people would be the main audience: “What I didn’t know was that millennials, all these people in their 20s who grew up playing it on the Nintendo, and trading cards, still loved the franchise, and leapt at the opportunity to re-engage with it.” Yet game designer Hwang says that it was just that group of dormant Pokémon lovers for whom the game was geared; he was careful to create a look and feel that didn’t feel juvenile. “It was a conscious decision to design it in a more sophisticated way,” he says. “The avatars that represent the users are 20-somethings, not 13-year-olds. The interface is more like a modern mapping application than a game, and it uses patterns borrowed heavily from best practices of mobile apps. That was all a conscious attempt to appeal to a broader audience — and we succeeded.” Hwang says that his septuagenarian mother is a hard-core level 25 player.
Hanke shrugs off claims that Pokémon Go was a two-month wonder, with users leaving with complaints that the game got monotonous. “The number of people who came into the pipeline in the first 60 days was unprecedented,” he says. “So yeah, the total number of users is going to drop. Many of those people stayed, and then new people are coming in, and that same pattern is repeating, as it would be normal with any game. We absolutely have a very strong sustained user base, and I think it will prove to be a very long-lived, popular, and profitable game.”
Niantic has released upgrades and staged in-game events to make gameplay more fun. A Halloween promotion jacked up US daily average users by almost 20 percent over the previous week. And this week, Pokémon Go finally shipped its long-awaited Apple Watch app.
Pokémon Go also brought in revenue selling users extra supplies and, in some countries, charging businesses for making their physical spaces into Pokéstops. The video game research company SuperData estimates that the game brought in $788 million this year (remember, it launched in July), over $200 million of which came during its August peak. “We’re making enough money to allow us to continue to build these experiences, which we love,” says Hanke. “Getting people outside, encouraging them to exercise, helping them learn about their community and to have fun with their kids and friends. And to push the envelope in augmented reality from the software side, for now.” And though Hanke is cryptic about it, conversation with him yields the impression that in 2017, Pokémon Go will become a lot more social.
It’s been a long journey from Cross Plains, Texas to Pokémon Go. But Hanke has made sure that his products would reach kids like he was, replacing the glossy copies of National Geographic with a form of teleportation that connects people in the remotest places to locations and communities all over the world. “Our goal was to make sure Pokémon Go was playable not only in places like San Francisco, with all its culture and art and everything, but also in small towns,” he says. “Through all the products built on our platform — games and non-games — we’ll continue to build out that Mirror World data set. And to learn about ways to use it for good things.”
Creative Art Direction by: Redindhi Studio
Photography by: Jason Henry
