GoKawiilOver the course of three days, Jacob Crowe walked 26 miles across Chicago in super-humid heat and rainy mornings, engaging in hundreds of virtual battles. He sought the rarest of Pokémon -- Shiny variants in particular -- alongside tens of thousands of other players.
"It makes it better to do it as a group together," Crowe said of the crowds that gathered to play the mobile game as part of Pokémon Go Fest.
And I was there too, among those thousands, draining my phone battery out in the sun while catching hundreds of virtual creatures in Grant Park and other parts of the city.
During that mass gathering in early June, the game I'd been playing alone for the past year suddenly felt like a gigantic concert packed with fans as obsessed as I am. Or even moreso.
I hadn't expected that. True, when Pokémon Go launched in 2016, it was a mobile gaming sensation. Phones in hand, players descended on parks and other public spaces to catch all those pocket monsters, in the form of augmented reality animations. For a while, it felt like everybody was playing Pokémon Go.
But then, as crazes do, Pokémon fever cooled down. People moved on. I stopped playing the game regularly not long after it debuted.
Turns out the enthusiasm has been simmering all along, and it just takes something like Go Fest to bring things to a boil.
The event had been expected to attract 40,000 people per day. But according to the enthusiast site GoNintendo, more than twice that many (90,000) tickets were sold for the Grant Park event (players entered and left at staggered times), and over 717,000 players in Chicago were recorded catching nearly 62 million Pokémon during citywide play. Six couples got engaged at the event, proving that Pokémon Go may be a stealth dating app.
Pokémon Go Fest 2026 was special because it marked the 10th anniversary of the game and the ninth anniversary of the first Go Fest, which also took place in Chicago. And it coincided with a Pokémon Fossil Museum exhibit at Chicago's Field Museum, which provides a spectacularly detailed (and, of course, made-up) history of Pokémon evolution, complete with gigantic skeletons, remains trapped in amber and a very robust gift shop.
The weekend also included a US Men's National Soccer Team match and a half-marathon. So many fans attended the various events that gameplay was suspended in some areas, including at the Field Museum.
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