Pokemon Go started as a Google Maps April Fools prank in 2014 and ended up, by May 2025, at the heart of Scopely's 3.5-billion-dollar purchase of Niantic's gaming division. This episode follows how engineer Tatsuo Nomura's Pokemon Challenge caught the eye of Niantic founder John Hanke, how The Pokemon Company's Tsunekazu Ishihara, an Ingress fan, greenlit the collaboration, and how Niantic reused years of Ingress player-submitted landmarks to build its PokeStops and Gyms, baking urban, early-adopter bias into the map.

We relive the July 2016 launch: 160 million dollars in the first month, 600 million in 90 days, traffic 50 times worse than the worst-case plan, crashing Kubernetes clusters, the deleted three-step tracker, lure modules boosting pizzerias and museums, players trespassing at Auschwitz and the 9/11 Memorial, fatal distracted-dri ...