Summer, 2001. Players install the boxed, retail software for an Electronic Arts game called Majestic. After signing up, the game sends players messages by phone, email, AIM, BlackBerry, and even fax—shards of a paranoia fiction story that plays out in real-time. The title goes on hiatus after the September 11 attacks—this was not the year for fourth-wall-breaking paranoia fiction entertainment. It shuts down the following spring, but not without establishing the genre of the alternate reality game (ARG).
Autumn, 2003. The Japanese gaming giant Konami releases Boktai, a vampire-hunting game for the GameBoy Advance. The title’s weapon uses sunlight to combat vampires, and it must be charged by taking the handheld gaming device outside to expose the cartridge’s light sensor to the sun. While created as pure entertainment, some bill it as an “exergame,” a video game that encourages physical activity.
Summer, 2004. A subliminal message in a theatrical trailer for the first-person shooter Halo 2 sends fans to an unassuming beekeeper’s website—the “rabbit hole” for an ARG called ilovebees. In the ensuing months, players around the world decode strange data that turns out to be GPS coordinates and timestamps for payphones, which ring to deliver both recorded and live updates from characters in the game’s fiction. In 2004, nobody has a GPS-enabled smartphone, yet, and payphones still exist.
Winter, 2004. High school students move a 20 foot-tall, inflatable big horn sheep through the streets of Minneapolis. They are armed with camera phones, which are still novel. The goal: to capture semacodes (an early QR code competitor) printed on billboards, bus ads, and other urban surfaces within the area occupied by the team’s animal totem. This is ConQwest, a “pervasive game” sponsored by the telecom company Qwest in ten US cities. Four years later, one of ConQwest’s creators, Dennis Crowley, creates the location check-in app Foursquare.
Spring, 2007. Area/Code, the creators of ConQwest, release Plundr, a location-based pirate adventure game that transforms wi-fi hotspots into islands on which players can trade and battle. To travel to a different island, players must physically relocate to another wireless hotspot. Suddenly, a Starbucks is not just a Starbucks.
These are just a few of the ancestors of Pokémon Go, the smartphone-based, physical-world rendition of the decades-old monster fighting game that took the world by storm over the weekend. It has a direct precursor, too: in 2012, Pokémon Go developer Niantic, previously a part of Google, had created Ingress, a science-fiction narrative game played in real locations with Android phones. Pokémon Gois really just a branded re-skin of Ingress, using the points of interest and mapping data that had been created for that game (or borrowed from Google).
Seen in the lineage of its ancestors, Pokémon Go isn’t what it seems on first blush. Billed as an augmented reality game, the title does offer an experience that blends computer graphics with live camera video. But that aspect of the title is entirely optional. Sure, it makes good on the delightful proposition of hunting Pokémon in the real, physical world, and at locations that correspond with the monsters’ various capacities. But mostly, it gives players appealing, local images to help endear others to the experience on social media—and thereby to spread the urge to play among others who’ve enjoyed Pokémon over the last two decades.
For the creators of alternate reality games, pervasive games, big games, and all the other names that have been used to describe computer games played in and across real-world spaces, Pokémon Go represents a bittersweet victory. On the one hand, it shows that an unlikely combination of technology and social will has finally made a truly mass-market pervasive game possible. On the other hand, as Area/Code co-founder and current NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz told me, “such a victory was only possible thanks to years of corporate patronage from Google, along with the licensing of the most popular videogame IP of all time.”