The accidental history of Niantic’s Pokémon Go, as told by John Hanke

Above: The phenomenon is a phenomenon all over again.

Image Credit: The Pokémon Company

GamesBeat: What did they do at the meetups?

Hanke: The difference between our game and just a meetup about a game is that you can get together and actually play the game. You’re physically coming together. You’re playing together. You’re catching Pokémon or harvesting items from Pokéstops, or in Ingress you’re harvesting things from portals and battling between the two factions. But then you can go for beers or food afterward.

It provides a great combination of gameplay and real live social hanging out. I think of it as a fun, very inexpensive alternative to going to a movie or just going to a restaurant or a bar. It’s more active than either of those. It provides a lot of open space for conversation and hanging out. It’s a great social option.

Players of Ingress liked it. We formalized those events and came up with a name for them. They’re called “Anomalies.” We started organizing them in cities around the world every month, on a monthly cadence. We settled on this pattern where on one weekend we’ll do an event in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. We pick three cities, one in each of those parts of the world, and every month we do a global event. Those now draw sometimes in excess of 10,000 people, a range of 5,000 to 15,000 people at each site. We’ve started live-streaming those. Our last event in Tokyo, Niconico had more than 60,000 people viewing the stream of the event and we had north of 10,000 people on site.

We wanted to do that with Pokémon Go. That was one of the things we wanted to transplant from our experience with Ingress and replicate with Pokémon Go. For those of you that have followed the Pokémon Go media thing, you’d be aware that users started spontaneously organizing events long before we ever got to it. A couple of weeks after the game launched there was an event with 9,000 people in San Francisco. Professional sports teams have organized Pokémon Go events in their stadiums. College campuses have done the same. Players have beaten us to the punch in terms of self-organizing these.

We’re supportive of that. These are fan-organized events. They’re not companies exploiting the brand at this point. It’s great. We probably will do our own events at some point in time. Pokémon of course has had tournaments and national championships and international championships for a long time. They’re definitely familiar with that phenomenon. Bringing Pokémon Go into that tradition of having Pokémon events is going to be great. But at the scale we’re at and the number of people that are getting together, logistically it’s pretty challenging. We have to figure out how to do these things safely and find the right venues and get the right staff in place. I’m looking forward to that.

Above: Paresh Dave of the LA Times interviews John Hanke of Niantic Labs at GamesBeat 2016.

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

GamesBeat: On the hardware side, do you think the future in augmented reality is this combination of smartphones with things like the pins Nintendo is going to start selling for Pokémon Go? Is there something specific that you see AR hardware evolving into? What do you want that would make the experience you’re trying to achieve better?

Hanke: I’m a science fiction fan. I want the contact lenses that transform everything into whatever themed world I want it to be. In Rainbows End Vernor Vinge described a world like that. A lot of people see that archetype as something we’d like to have. It’s probably going to get created within our lifetimes. I’m looking forward to it.

When we started Niantic, there was a watch project underway at Google. There was what ultimately became Google Glass. I personally see an evolution of wearables — things like watches that you carry with you, Fitbit, Pokémon Go Plus — towards glasses, and glasses evolving from things that are maybe not super sleek and sexy in the beginning to models that are more and more so over time.

To me it’s a continuum. It’s not a binary thing, where there’s no AR one day and then AR arrives the next when some particular device gets launched. You can do a fun AR experience with just a phone. Pokémon Go proves that. But it’ll be better with devices. I’m looking forward to the Pokémon Go Plus launch, because that’s going to give people a way to play the game and not look at their phone all the time. They can look around them and see the interesting places that we’re trying to help people discover.

But we’ll definitely take advantage of other kinds of AR devices as they become prevalent out in the market. I’m excited about investing in that area, about building prototypes and bringing our gaming products to that hardware as it comes to market. Maybe we’ll be helping some of that hardware be successful in the marketplace. It’s a really exciting time for anyone making games, anticipating the kinds of experiences we’ll be able to create as those devices transform people’s experience out in the world.

GamesBeat: Back to software for the last question. Part of what’s made Pokémon Go is this aspect of having to figure it out yourself. There aren’t a lot of instructions. You talk to your friends and learn about it. How do you maintain that going forward?

Hanke: Augmented reality, that real-world gaming concept — you can embed interesting hidden things out in the world. They can have all kinds of different behaviors. You can find them by yourself, interact with them, interact with other people. The gameplay mechanics — that’s one thing I’m most excited about. We’ve only just scratched the surface. There’s this whole new set of game interactions that we can start experimenting with and building products around. There’s ample room for products that are going to surprise users that are very different from what we’ve done with Ingress or Pokémon Go.

There’s a ton of way you can take that into different kinds of games and build different kinds of experiences. And as new hardware comes online it’s going to be super fun to see what people create. We’ll take a stab at it, but I hope other people in the industry jump in and create fun games that I can go out and play.