A decade later, Pokémon Go finally made good on its original promise

When Niantic dropped the first Pokémon Go trailer in 2015, it was hard to grasp how a bunch of players could work together to catch a pokémon like Mewtwo. But this week at the game’s 10th anniversary event in New York City, Pokémon Go showed the world how it’s done. Almost 2,000 players (many of them Pokémon Go influencers) packed into Times Square on Thursday evening to participate in a special battle. It was cool to see Times Square briefly go dark before the billboards began lighting up, revealing an escaped Mewtwo Mega Evolving, and it was even wilder to see people living the fantasy depicted in the game’s first trailer.

Even though most people had never played a mobile game like Pokémon Go when the game debuted in 2016, the trailer made the general idea easy enough to understand. Players were meant to go out into the world, and the game would tell them where they might be able to find wild, catchable monsters if they could get to a specific area fast enough. The trailer made gameplay seem like it could be a chill, solitary experience, but it also featured wild shots of crowds teaming up to take down powerful pokémon. Raids hadn’t been introduced to the game at that point, but it was clear that Niantic had plans to make things like catching legendaries feel special.

In a press release, Scopely — which acquired Niantic’s games business last year — VP of product Michael Steranka explained that the recent anniversary event was the company’s way of living up to that first trailer. “When we first dreamt what Pokémon GO might become a decade ago, hosting more than a thousand people in a single, local raid battle was just a pipe dream,” Steranka wrote. “Seeing that vision become a reality in Times Square was the perfect way to celebrate 10 years of playing together with our community.”

This latest in-person event was a far cry from the game’s first in 2017, when thousands of players descended upon Chicago only to find their poké-plans scuttled by network overloads and software issues that Niantic took ultimately credit for. Steranka joined Niantic that same year to help coordinate the disastrous Chicago event, and during a press briefing this week, he said that — at the time — he thought that he “should have been fired” for how things played out.

“I also quickly discovered from this experience that the Pokémon Go team does not point fingers,” Steranka said. “Instead of trying to find someone to blame, everybody came together, and we spun up an offsite in Seattle to learn what went wrong and how to fix things.”

Doubling down on and expanding the scope of its in-person, community-focused events has been key to Pokémon Go’s exponential growth over the years. According to Scopely, over 800 million people have downloaded Pokémon Go since the game first launched, and the company raked in $1 billion from Go in 2025 alone. For years, Niantic struggled to replicate that kind of success with its other IP-focused augmented reality games, like Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Catan: World Explorers. Pokémon Go’s continued popularity is somewhat surprising considering how the core gameplay hasn’t really changed all that much. But Scopely’s games president, Ed Wu, attributes Pokémon Go’s staying power to the way the company has put much more emphasis on cultivating player communities.

“What started as an invitation to explore the world around you has become something that brings players together across cities, countries, and cultures, from neighborhood meetups to celebrations that draw hundreds of thousands of people together,” Wu said in a press statement. “As we look ahead, our commitment remains unchanged: to keep evolving the game in ways that turn everyday places into opportunities for discovery and connection.”

Scopely sees Pokémon Go as a forever game both because of the franchise’s ever-expanding roster of monsters and the fact that there are always going to be people — especially younger ones — who have never played before. With each new mainline Pokémon game launch, a new generation of players arrives. When I asked Wu how his team plans to evolve Pokémon Go in the future, he didn’t go into specifics. But he said that Scopely is looking into capitalizing on the ways that people of different ages (e.g., children and their parents) get one another into Pokémon and how gyms can be used to foster communities.

This Saturday and Sunday, millions of people are probably going to be out and about participating in 2026’s global Pokémon Go Fest that will see the map light up with even more Mewtwo encounters and challenges that require players to work together. It’ll be the game’s most ambitious event yet, but with a set of new mainline Pokémon titles dropping next year, Pokémon Go will still have room to grow.