Theres been GPS games before, though not on the same visual and pop culture level as this one.
A few years ago I tried Turf Wars and Parallel Mafia in which you could travel to a real word location, claim “turf” from which you could collect $$$$ sand even engage in what turned out to be either unwelcome or one-sided wars with other wanna-be gangsters. For whatever reason I quickly grew bored with both, but can see someone taking the Pokemon Go concept and turning it into a more quick-fix Mafia or “assassination” game soon.
What other games have successfully used the Pokemon-GPS-and also, lets not forget the iPhone-movement concept, if any? If not, are there games down the pike?
Pokemon Go is in some ways just a Pokemon skinned Ingress, which is Niantic’s previous game before developing Go. That’s a little bit reductive (there’s no monster catching in Ingress), but they’re very similar. In fact, the Pokestops and Gyms in Pokemon Go are seeded off of locations you were supposed to visit in Ingress, and Pokemon spawn locations are based off of the locations you could get a resource called XM in Ingress. Ingress even had two rival teams which captured locations like gyms.
I didn’t know Pokemon go was Niantic, but I certainly noticed the similarity to ingress and felt no need to try it. I played ingress for a month and realized it wasn’t actually fun. I predict a similar trajectory for Pokemon go