Pokemon Go: How long would it take to be successful?
Before Pokemon Go was a worldwide sensation to gamers, Pokémon lovers and people that are curious about the craze will be able to know more first about the creator who managed to shatter all the records with his created game. The first week the game was released to the public, it had more than 10 million downloads, Twitter exceeded in terms of daily active users, and had higher average user time than social networking sites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“It takes 20 years to make an overnight success. There are solutions to that.” – John Hanke
John Hanke stated those during an interview in the United States that consisted of the challenges he had to go through just to create Pokémon Go.
What is John Hanke’s history before he even created Pokémon Go in the first place? What made him a successful entrepreneur until to this moment?
John Hanke is an American entrepreneur that currently runs Niantic Labs, which is a company that explores experimental mobile, social and local applications, such as Ingress and Pokémon Go. He grew up in Texas and received his bachelor’s degree from University of Texas in Austin.
He was one of the main reasons why Google Earth was created; he helped developed software that eventually became Google Earth today. A few years ago, the idea of Pokémon Go actually popped when Google, as an April Fool’s Day Joke, made an announcement of a fictional product that will involve catching Pokémon using Google Maps.
Meridan 59 was the first major MMORPG. (Meridan59.com)
While Hanke was still a student in 1996, his first experience with large online gaming was not with Pokemon Go. In fact, he helped create the first commercial Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) called Meridan 59. He sold this game to 3DO to move on into mapping the world, which is a bigger passion for Hanke. This was Hanke’s first level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go.
John Hanke launched Keyhole in 2000, which had aerial photography and it was usable to link maps. Also, the creation of the 1st online GPS-linked 3D aerial map of the world was born during this time. This is Hanke’s second level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go.
Google bought Keyhole in 2004, and with John’s help, they turned Keyhole into an updated “Google Earth”. During this time, GPS-based games was the decision that John focused to do. This is Hanke’s third level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go.
Google Maps Google Street View
The Google Geo team was run by John from 2004-2010. In this way, they created Google Maps and Google Street View. During that time, Pokemon Go was created after he collected the team. This is Hanke’s fourth level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go.
Niantic Labs was launched by John in 2010 and it serves as a start-up funded by Google in order to create a game layer on maps. This is Hanke’s fifth level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go.
John explained why he called it Niantic:
“The Niantic is the name of a whaling ship that came up during the gold rush and through a variety of circumstances got dragged on shore. This happened with other ships, too. Over the years, San Francisco was basically just built over these ships. You could stand on top of them now, and you wouldn’t know it. So it’s this idea that there’s stuff about the world that’s really cool but even though it’s on the Internet, it’s hard to know when you’re actually there.”
Ingress
John created Niantic’s first geo-based MMO, “Ingress” in 2012. This is Hanke’s sixth level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go. He explained about Ingress in this way:
“In the case of Ingress the activity is layered on top of the real world and on your phone. The inspiration was that it was something that I always used to daydream about while I was commuting back and forth from home to Google. I always thought you could make an awesome game using all the Geo data that we have. I watched phones become more and more powerful and I thought the time would come that you could do a really awesome real-world adventure-based game.”
Google and the Pokemon Company teamed up for an April Fools’ Day joke in 2014, which allowed viewers to use Google Maps to find Pokemon creatures. John thought this idea could be turned into a realistic game after it became viral. This is Hanke’s seventh level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go.
On John’s eighth level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go, Pokemon Go was decided and built upon John’s shoulders on the team-up of the players of Ingress that the exact location of this mobile game application is at user-generated meeting points. And the most popular idea in the said game became the Pokestops and gyms respectively. John said that:
” The Pokéstops are submitted by users, so obviously they’re based on places people go to. We had essentially two and a half years of people going to all the places where they thought they should be able to play Ingress, so it’s some pretty remote places. There are portals in Antartica, the North Pole and at most points in between.”
In the likes of the companies and investors like Google, Nintendo and the Pokemon Company, $25 million was raised by John starting from December 2015 to February 2016 that launched Pokemon Go at its finest this year that grew a team of 40+ respectively. This is John’s ninth level-up in his life to reach Pokemon Go. Everything is definitely a step-by step process before achieving to the actual goal. In John’s last step to reach Pokemon Go, an overnight phenomenon was clearly stated for the specific reason that Pokemon Go was officially launched on the 6th of July in the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand by John and his team. After the said official launch, daily in in-app purchases are already been generating constantly, and Nintendo’s share price rose up to $12 billion which was through the help of Pokemon gamers, lovers, and many more who simply are keeping on playing this game all over again, even though going through the risks of the game by its real world and time settings, but there are surely people who endear Pokemon even before this successful app was even created!