Today is Pokemon Go’s fifth anniversary – at least, it’s the fifth anniversary of the game’s initial launch. Pokemon Go’s global rollout took weeks – months, in some cases – to finally reach everyone, but it made its official debut five years ago today. Twenty One Pilots were top of the charts, an aging England team had just been eliminated from Euro 2016 by Iceland, and there was no deadly pandemic floating around. How times change.
Everyone was a Pokemon fan that summer. Pokemon has a lot of fans at the best of times, but 2016 was a different animal. You had to be there, man. Although I guess since it was only five years ago, you all were. But if we all remember its impact so much, why does it never feel like it gets the credit it's due? Pokemon Go is the best game of this century. That might seem controversial, but I have no problem standing behind it. In fact, I don’t even think it’s up against any serious contenders.
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“But wait,” I hear you cry, “what about [insert_popular_game]?” Yeah, it’s good, probably. It’s not Pokemon Go though, is it? I’ve played a lot of PoGo since it launched five years ago, and written almost as much about it, so I know it has its flaws – loads of them. The Kanto Eevees have been neglected, the battle UI is terrible, the introduction of 12km eggs during the pandemic was moronic, and the decision to walk back the pandemic upgrades that made playing easier feels like a huge backwards step – isn’t that what ‘walk back’ means, after all?
I know it isn’t perfect, and I know the likes of The Witcher 3, GTA 5, both The Last of Us games, and many more besides can point to their perfect tens and 90+ ratings on Metacritic. Pokemon Go, somewhat staggeringly, has a 69 on Metacritic. On one hand, nice, but on the other, what on Earth is that about? I’m not one to get upset about what numbers a stranger gave to a toy, especially when it comes to bitter arguments about how Ghost of Tsushima is CLEARLY an 85 and gaming journalists are trash-eating stinkbags for giving it an 83, but 69? Again, nice, but even though I know it was bugged at launch, often shutting down completely, and that many of the features now considered basic functions – Raid battles, quests, shinies, and so on – weren’t implemented when the majority of the reviews were written, Pokemon Go was more than just a game. Pokemon Go /was/ the summer of 2016. Turns out, it was the Summer of ‘69 after all.
For gameplay, graphics, guns, and all the other guicy g-words we associate with gaming, Pokemon Go is way down the list. Hell, there aren’t any guns at all, unless you count Machamp’s biceps. But the reason Pokemon Go is the clear front runner for ‘best game of the 21st Century’ is because everyone played it. Popularity is not always an indicator of quality, but I don’t mean ‘everyone’ as in ‘everyone who usually plays games’ – I mean ‘everyone’. Grannies and grandads that had never played a video game in their lives were sat in the park tossing virtual pokeballs at virtual Pidgeys, along with real bread at real pigeons. Families were playing it together. Ariana Grande famously went undercover in a Pikachu costume to play it without getting mobbed by fans. Japanese gymnast Kohei Uchimura racked up a $5,000 roaming bill while representing his country at the 2016 Olympics because he played Pokemon Go incessantly at the Games. Everyone played.
The world changed for it, with cafes and restaurants conjuring up Pokemon Go based offers, while other businesses tried to shoo players away, either with signs, new fences, or good ol’ fashioned calls to the cops.
Pokemon Go is the best game of this century in the same way the Wii is the greatest console of all time. I love the Wii because it’s the only console I’ve consistently been able to convince non-gamers to play and stick with. You can point to the various superior features in [insert_popular_game] all you like. I get it. I understand that by those metrics, your game of choice is clearly better. Well done you. But even if you disagree with my metric – namely, the best games are the ones that convince people who don’t usually play games to play them – it’s hard to overlook Pokemon Go. There are a few Wii titles that share a similar playerbase, but none were as influential on popular culture as Pokemon Go.
Strangely, now that it is a better game – in the sense that it has more features and offers more activity – it isn’t having the same impact. It still has a huge number of hardcore players and makes bucketloads of money, but its time as the world’s favourite game has been and gone. Five years on, it’s worth looking back and remembering just how beloved it was, and arguing that it deserves a much more established place in video game history.