Pokemon GO - Real World Battle

Geo-caching is about to go mainstream with the release of Pokémon GO. Today Nintendo announced a new smart phone Pokémon game which will allow players to track, catch and battle Pokémon in the real world.

In 2014 Google and Nintendo teamed up to release an epic April Fool's Google Maps game called Pokémon Challenge. In this game 150 Pokémon were hidden on Google Maps throughout the world. Players then had the task to hunt down and capture the 150 Pokémon on Google Maps.

The game was incredibly popular and it seems to have inspired Nintendo to create its own real-world Pokémon game. There is even a Google Maps connection in the development of this new game. Pokémon GO is being developed in collaboration with Niantic, a former Google start up which became an independent company last month.

Niantic are the creators of the incredibly popular Ingress game. Ingress is an augmented-reality massively-multiplayer online role-playing location-based game. In the game players use their smart-phones to navigate around the real world capturing territory for one of the two main factions in the game.

In Pokémon GO players will also use their phones to hunt down and capture Pokémon in real world locations. At the moment it appears that the iOS and Android applications for the game will be free to play. However, Nintendo are also releasing a watch-like peripheral which will flash and vibrate when you are near to a Pokémon and include a button which you can press to catch the Pokémon.

Nintendo intend to release Pokémon GO in 2016.