Game Informer: How did Pokémon Go come about? Did The Pokémon Company come to you? Or did you bring a pitch to them and show them Ingress as a possible template?
Yeah, we went out and talked to them. So, we launched Ingress in 2012 – November 2012. Yeah, we’re growing that product and seeing it be a hit worldwide. And then in 2014 – I believe if that’s the right date – that year just keeps getting mixed up in my head, Google and The Pokémon Company did an April Fool’s joke around Google Maps, where Pokémon spontaneously appeared in Google Maps, which ended up being tremendously successful; it went viral. There’s a video about it that got umpteen million views. And so, within the Niantic team, we were thinking about, we built the game, it’s our intent to build a platform, what would be the next step towards growing the platform? And Pokémon was the idea that seemed incredibly obvious to us, given just the structure of the game, given the fact that it’s about chasing Pokémon and capturing Pokémon out in the real world seemed to be super natural to just substitute a mobile phone for the Pokémon and Pokédex. So we actually surfaced the idea with The Pokémon Company, there was interest, they were actually playing Ingress, and Mr. Ishihara, the CEO of the Pokémon company – I met him maybe a month later, and he was like a level 11 Ingress player, so he compulsively played. And his wife was a – and I guess they are still playing – his wife was a high-level Ingress agent as well. So, they’ve been playing together, then a lot of people in The Pokémon Company were Ingress players, so when we pitched this idea of a Pokémon-like game built on the concept that we’d built with Ingress it was very well-received. I mean, we both brought ideas, being the very obvious thing. And yeah, we started the project, and here we are.
