GoKawiilThe air in Times Square on Thursday evening is electric. Not only because it was raining and thousands of Pokémon are virtually flinging attacks like Thunderbolt and Hyper Beam at the legendary Mega Mewtwo Y, but also because more than 1,500 real-world trainers found themselves at one of the largest in-person Pokémon battles in history.
PHOTOGRAPH: Julian Chokkattu
The event marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Pokémon Go, the mobile game by Niantic that took the world by storm in 2016. The game—a mixed-reality hunting game that plays out in real physical locations as viewed through the players’ phones—attracted more than 130 million downloads in its first month and a record peak of 232 million active players the same year, generating nearly $1 billion in revenue.
Niantic’s effort to turn it into one of the first mobile “forever games” has been successful, with more than $6 billion in lifetime player spending, according to 2024 data from Statista. Last year, Niantic's games business was acquired by Scopely—one of the largest mobile video game publishers in the world, with titles like Monopoly Go! under its belt—for $3.5 billion.
Right before its debut, the game's first trailer promised all sorts of capabilities that weren't available at launch. The video showed players trading Pokémon with friends, battling other trainers, and, at the very end of the clip, a swarm of trainers making their way to Times Square, where every billboard has been taken over to visualize a massive fight against the formidable Mewtwo. Yet in 10 years of live Pokémon Go Fests around the world, the company has never re-created that scene—until now.
“We sort of made promises to players on the type of game that this was going to be,” says Michael Steranka, vice president of product at Scopely, who has worked on Pokémon Go at Niantic since 2017. “Now, 10 years later, when we look back at that trailer, we feel like we've actually delivered on a lot of the promises made there.”