Pokémon Go, or the map that told you to move
The night of July 14, 2016, a Vaporeon appeared in Central Park. It was a rare, water-type creature visible only on a smartphone screen, existing nowhere except as a GPS coordinate in Manhattan — but within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting across the Sheep Meadow toward it, some still in work clothes, some in pajamas. No one called them. No broadcast went out. The map called them.
That map was Pokémon Go, launched eight days earlier by a company called Niantic, and it had just demonstrated something cartographers had been working toward for ten thousand years: a map capable of moving people.
John Hanke, the man who made it, had spent his career building maps. In 2001 he co-founded Keyhole, a satellite-imagery startup funded in part by the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel. Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 for $35 million in stock and rebuilt it as Google Earth. Hanke stayed, running the geo division that grew to more than a thousand engineers building Google Maps, Street View, and SketchUp. In 2010, still inside Google, he started Niantic to do something the maps division never would: make the map into a game.
That game was Ingress, launched in 2013. Players crossed cities to capture “portals” — public art, churches, historical markers — for faction battles. Within two years, Ingress had seven million players and a database of GPS coordinates for every interesting corner of human geography that those millions had bothered to walk to and tag. Niantic never called it a cartographic exercise. It was one.
When Pokémon Go launched on July 6, 2016, the Ingress portals became PokéStops and Gyms: same coordinates, same underlying database, new icons drawn on top. Water-type Pokémon appeared near actual water because the game ran GIS queries against hydrological data. Electric-types clustered near power infrastructure. The map understood terrain; the creatures were the costume.
One hundred million people downloaded the game in twenty-five days, faster than any app to that point. Forty-five million were playing simultaneously at peak. The consequences were immediate and ungoverned. Two men in Encinitas, California, fell off an ocean bluff chasing a Pokémon. In Wyoming, a teenager named Shayla Wiggins waded into the Big Wind River looking for water-types and found a human body instead. A gym was placed at Panmunjom, the truce village on the Korean DMZ; Niantic removed it. The map had no concept of “you shouldn’t go there.”
What it had was a premise: the thing you want is at this coordinate, and your legs are the obstacle. For millennia, maps had been static objects — a Ptolemaic grid, a Hereford vellum, a Cassini triangulation — things you consulted and put down. Pokémon Go made the map into a continuous instruction. The coordinate summoned a crowd to a meadow, sent a teenager into a river, and assigned a game flag to the most heavily armed border in Asia. The territory was real. Only the reason for crossing it was invented.
The old cartographers would have found the Vaporeon baffling. The map’s reach, they would have understood immediately.
Sources
- Pokémon Go — Wikipedia — launch date, download statistics, PokéStop origins in Ingress, OpenStreetMap integration.
- John Hanke — Wikipedia — Keyhole founding, CIA/In-Q-Tel investment, Google acquisition, Niantic history.
- GIS and Cartography in Pokémon Go — USC — PokéStop placement methodology, water-type GIS logic, broader cartographic significance.
- Dead Body Found During Pokémon Go — GameSpot — Shayla Wiggins, Big Wind River, Wyoming, July 2016.