Pokemon Go was an April Fool's joke before it became a huge hit

Washington

POKEMON Go, the location-based mobile game that has become a massive hit, began as an April Fool's joke.

In 2014, Google unveiled "Pokemon Challenge" for Google Maps complete with a promotional video, inviting users to find and capture the cutesy fictional monsters within the application. The feature was active for a short while before it was turned off.

But John Hanke, chief executive officer of Niantic Labs, took it seriously. The company that was then part of Google had already scored a hit with the location-based game Ingress, and combining the world of Pokemon with such gameplay was an obvious step. He asked Masashi Kawashima, director of Asia-Pacific for Niantic, whether "it could be done in the real world". Pokemon Go has grabbed peoples' attention by blending the spheres of Pokemon and mobile gaming. There's a ready-made generation of fans, nurtured on playing cards, video games and cartoon shows, familiar with the story-line of finding, training and pitting "pocket monsters" against each other. With the new game, players are encouraged to traverse their physical surroundings, phone in hand, to find new characters. The game's exploding popularity has sent people into bars and pizzerias, led to the discovery of a dead body and may even be helping robbers target victims."This is probably the first smartphone game that has spawned a social phenomenon," said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute in Tokyo. "The key thing is…