'Go' will include 100 Pokémon to start, many from the original Red and Blue versions Niantic says around 100 Pokémon will be available at launch, many from the series’ original 1996 releases, with more to come over time. You’ll be able to fire it up, see your character on a map, and wander a city looking for and capturing the titular creatures in their natural habitats. Pokémon Go comes out later this year as a free-to-play title for iOS and Android. Not only that, but Pokémon Go may just thrust AR, a relatively obscure technology, into the mainstream, thanks to one of the most beloved brands of the last two decades. For a series that has long resisted the urge to migrate beyond Nintendo-made hardware, this release marks a pivotal moment for the franchise’s gatekeepers and its diehard fans. Perhaps more importantly, Go is the first full-blown mobile-first Pokémon game, with the blessing of both Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. In true AR fashion, Go overlays text, graphics, and, yes, your friendly neighborhood Charmander by scanning a scene and understanding where to place the objects. We got an inside look at the title last week at the company’s offices in San Francisco, and it’s clear Go is one of the most ambitious AR games to date. And Niantic, now a standalone company, is responsible for making it happen. Two years later, that wish is coming true in the form of a mobile game called Pokémon Go. Even though people were quite aware the video was fake, they wanted it badly to be real. The clip quickly racked up millions of views on YouTube. The hoax video, which was bundled with a Google Maps mini-game, showed a slew of explorers finding Pokémon hidden in nature, using software that could map a virtual creature to the physical surroundings. It was 2014, and Google’s Niantic Inc., the studio behind augmented reality Android game Ingress, got a glimpse at what a Pokémon game may look like if AR technology was many years more advanced than it is today. The seeds of Pokémon Go were first planted with an April Fools’ joke.

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