Pokemon Go has become a cultural phenomena in the few short weeks since its release, but it would be wrong to call it an overnight success. The technology that allowed the augmented reality game to come into existence is the result of over a decade of hard work being driven by Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke. And Pokemon Go is hardly his first success.
He’s also responsible for a program called Keyhole, which Google bought and renamed Google Earth. After heading up the Google Maps division, he went on to create the predecessor to Pokemon Go, a science fiction game called Ingress where players activate beacons around their neighborhoods to gain points for their team.
According to Hanke, without Ingress there wouldn’t have been a Pokemon Go. Not just because Ingress gave Niantic Labs a backbone to build off of and experience in running a massive mobile multiplayer game. It was also played a large part in getting The Pokemon Company to work with them. according to Forbes:
“In that preliminary phase Mr. [Tsunekazu] Ishihara [the CEO of The Pokémon Company] had become aware of Ingress. By the time I met him, he was a higher level than I was. They just got it, we didn’t really have to pitch it. … I was a level 10 player, he was level 11. There are 16 levels, and to be 14, 15, 16 you have to be crazy hardcore.”
Niantic and The Pokemon Company were obviously hoping the game would catch on, but the speed of success surprised everyone.
“We expected tens of millions of users to sign up and create accounts. Based on our projections, we got — in the first two weeks — somewhere we expected we’d get sometime by the middle of next year.”
That’s left the company struggling to keep its servers humming as more countries come online.
“You fix something here and that relieves some pressure but then that forces more pressure somewhere else in the system and you have to fix that. We had this cascading set of things where we added more machines and things broke at this level then we fixed them, and things broke at this level then we fixed them, and things broke at this level then we fixed them. We’re now at a level that we’re at pretty good shape from where things go from here.”
That should make Pokemon Go users happy, but Hanke admitted there would be no pleasing everyone, especially certain media outlets and politicians trying to paint the game as dangerous. He listed off some of the controversies to Forbes.
“Someone found a dead body. Someone got mugged. Someone drove their car into a police car. It’s not really about the game, it’s more a ding on society that we live in a world where dead bodies are floating around to be found. We want to make the game as safe as possible. It’s not dissimilar to Strava or a running app.”
He’s also been watching with interest as players developed ways to try and hack the game. Some methods, like attaching phones to model trains and turntables to hatch eggs, he finds amusing. But others, like sites that try to scrape data on where different Pokemon spawn, he’s not too happy with.
“Yeah, I don’t really like that. Not a fan. We have priorities right now but they might find in the future that those things may not work. People are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game. People are hacking around trying to take data out of our system and that’s against our terms of service.”
All the craziness from the launch has kept John from playing his own game. He revealed that since his beta account was wiped out, he’d only built himself back up to level five. A week in Asia also set him back — apparently even the creator of the game couldn’t get around the geo-block in Japan that was only lifted recently.
(Via Forbes)