Niantic CEO John Hanke has explained how the upcoming mobile title Pokemon GO came to be. The inspiration came from an April Fools prank that Google made three years ago, in which Google and the Pokemon Company collaborated on a Google Maps prank called the Pokemon Challenge. Hanke went on to explain that Tatsuo Nojima was the one who was inspired from that idea and would become the center of the development for the game that would become Pokemon GO.
Pokemon GO is scheduled to release on iOS and Android devices in 2016.
That Pokémon Challenge was a chance for us to be able to build relations with people at Pokémon, and then [The Pokémon Company] president [Tsunekazu] Ishihara and John [Hanke] were able to meet and talk. At that time both of their thoughts and visions were also very close, and as a union of their spirit, the talk became ‘Let’s do something together in the future.’
Pokémon GO-ogle. Now I see.
See even pranks can be for good in life.
Lame shit
Oh I remember this. It was like that pokemon university shit.
And it’ll be just like that in the final game.
Wasn’t this a known fact months ago? I swear there were interviews with people on the Dev team back around the announcement talking about it’s roots in the google maps joke.