It was 1998, and only one thing mattered to me: becoming a Pokémon master. Like every other six-year-old in America at the time, I poured every fiber of my mental and physical being into this fantastical universe. My thumbs were glued to my Gameboy, my pockets stuffed with trading cards, and my eyes transfixed on Pikachu’s latest adventure on TV.
Pokémon had tapped into just about every expression of children’s entertainment, but nothing quite matched my deep, visceral need for the Tiger Electronics First American Pokédex Toy.
For the uninitiated, a Pokédex is pocket-sized, all-in-one instrument used within the Pokémon universe to inform and guide your avatar throughout the game, kind of like the ultimate Siri device.
Sure, seeing it now, it could be passed off as a Happy Meal toy, but encountering a real-life Pokédex at the age of six made the whole thing feel real. For the first time, I could physically handle something that allowed me to suspend disbelief and fully live out my Pokémon fantasies. That piece of red plastic quickly became my tangible portal into an alternate world.
But we grow older; things change. Over the following decade my relationship with Pokémon became shaky. The TV show, movies, and trading cards that had once felt so ingrained in my life fell to the wayside.
Fast forward to September 2015.
A trailer debuted for a new mobile app called Pokémon GO. Its flashy opening sequence suggested a hyper-real augmented reality experience. By this point everyone had heard of VR and AR, but it hadn’t really gone mainstream. The promo looked interesting, but I came away expecting little more than a watered-down distillation of the console games with some AR-like gimmicks.
Last week the app finally dropped, and nothing has been the same since.
Over the past several days, Pokémon GO has not only lived up to the promises of its trailer, but has pushed further, fulfilling the collective childhood dream of a whole generation: becoming a real-life Pokémon master. What the plastic Pokédex toy did for me at age six pales in comparison to the implications of this app.
In collaboration with Google-incubated AR pioneer Niantic Inc., The Pokémon Company has taken a huge step forward in bringing its fictional creations to life. Using a massive database of geotagged landmarks and a clever interface, Pokémon GO allows you to see and interact with the actual physical world through the lens of a Pokémon trainer. Every location in the game is tied to an actual location in the real world, making the experience uniquely immersive.
The application of AR is a radical departure from the fundamental Pokémon gameplay, but it’s not too different from Niantic’s 2013 offering, Ingress. GO has taken its technological predecessor’s core mechanics and massively beefed up the experience by incorporating deeper stories, more compelling characters, and most importantly, a massive and loyal fanbase.
And maybe that’s the key insight for AR to come out of this: without story, characters, or history — the same things that make for great movies or TV— the tech itself doesn’t mean much. The story animates the technology; not the other way around. That’s what makes GO so exciting for me and many others.
This past weekend, I spent hours walking around my city, bumping into fellow Pokémon GO players, striking up candid conversations and catching Doduos left and right. At one point, I witnessed a group of 20 strangers excitedly yell out in unison when a Scyther appeared in the area. I overheard a woman bemoan “all these nerds playing Pokémon in the park,” so I offered her my phone to give it a try—she downloaded the app on the spot and had soon joined the rest of us.
For the first time since I opened that Pokédex toy, I was able to suspend my current reality and enter a new one—one that my six-year-old self could never have imagined.
