"Pokemon Go" Will Soon Bring Monsters Into Your World—With Augmented Reality

Soon, the whole world will be your Pokémon playground, and to catch 'em all, you'll have to get out of the house.

Pokémon Go, a mobile game jointly produced by The Pokémon Company, Nintendo, and Niantic, will be launching later this summer for iOS and Android. Recently, WIRED visited Niantic's office to get a demo of how the augmented-reality game will let players capture monsters in their own neighborhoods, and battle them at landmarks around their cities and towns. In the 20 years since the release of the original Pokémon games, what kid hasn't dreamed about going off and having their own IRL Pokémon adventure? Go is about as close as they're likely to get.

"It's exactly what Pokémon games are about," says The Pokémon Company's J.C. Smith. "You're a kid in a town, and you go and explore it, and capture Pokémon, and battle." And it could reach an even wider audience than the Pokémon role-playing games for Nintendo's own game hardware (it has sold 14 million copies of Pokémon X and Pokémon Y for its 3DS system). "As well as Nintendo's products have sold," says Smith, "not everyone has a 3DS. A lot more people have a cell phone."

While it's Nintendo and The Pokémon Company that are bringing the big franchise to mobile, it's Niantic that's bringing the magic. A former Google division that was spun off late last year (and now has Nintendo as an investor), it created Ingress, a GPS-enabled augmented-reality game that's been a worldwide hit. You play the game by traveling to real-world landmarks designated as "portals." In Pokémon Go, those* *become one of two Pokémon-specific areas: "Pokestops," where you can acquire new items, like Pokeballs that let you capture more monsters; or "gyms," where you can battle other players' Pokémon. For instance, underneath the Bay Bridge near Niantic's San Francisco office is a Pokestop, and nearby art installation Cupid's Span—which looks like a giant bow and arrow lodged in a grassy patch of park—is a gym.

But what if you don't live in San Francisco? Niantic CEO John Hanke, who "grew up in a town of 1,000 people [with a] single blinking stoplight and a Dairy Queen," says that problem has been solved---by Ingress players.

"In every community, whether it's rural Sri Lanka or downtown Manhattan, there are places that people know about and are proud of," Hanke says. "We had to crowdsource that, which we did with Ingress." In all, Hanke says there are about 15 million different points of interest that served as portals in Ingress, and now will serve as Pokestops and gyms in Go. Libraries, museums, historical markers, statues, public artwork... anything of cultural or historial interest.