Among the many stories about the beginning of ‘Pokémon Go’ that we can tell (how it revolutionized that summer, how it invented new ways to revolutionize the franchise, how it even made groups of friends), there is one that is usually kept hidden: in reality, it all started as an April Fools’ joke.
Royal Brominches
Since the year 2000, Google has included a lot of jokes on April 1st: the first one was to make us believe that it could read our thoughts and search according to them, only to receive error messages like “Error 4P: It is not clear if your search is about money or monkeys. Please try again”. 14 years later, this system of jokes was so perfected that it was time to launch the ‘Pokémon Challenge’.
Game Freak, The Pokemon Company, Nintendo and Google have joined forces to launch a new application on Android and iOS that allows you to capture Pokémon while exploring the real world. Other jokes from that year included including David Hasselhoff in all your photos uploaded to Google+ (which is none) or WazeDates, an app to find parking and, by the way, love.
‘Pokémon Challenge’ went viral very quickly, and many dreamed of a real, long version that wasn’t a joke. Nintendo, who must have thought that truth comes out in jest, teamed up with Niantic (Tsunekazu Isihara was a fan of ‘Ingress’, their previous game) to create that dreamed version to see if it worked out and continue increasing the dominance of ‘Pokémon’ in humanity.
In 2016, ‘Pokémon Go’ was released, and eight years later we are still receiving updates on one of the most lucrative mobile games in history, a little joke that, to everyone’s surprise, ended up becoming one of the game-changers in history.
