The Rise of Niantic

This is just episode one. Now. I'm pretty sure that tech Stuff way back in the day covered Pokemon Go when it first came out, But there is a lot more to talk about now. Plus now I actually know what Pokemon's are and as they say, you got to get all of them. But I kid the millennials, This old Gen X podcaster is gonna die into the story of Niantic, the games that has produced, and the tech

that makes it all possible. We'll talk a bit about augmented reality, GEO location and combining online in real world experiences, and in the next episode will also cover stuff like micro transactions too, because those will also come into play, and they're incredibly important. But first, let's learn the history of the company. Our story begins in eighteen forty nine. Okay, not really, but I do want to cover the origin of the name, which actually comes fairly late in our story.

But I want to talk about the origin itself first because it's a neat story that I did not know until I looked into this, you know topic. So back in the mid nineteenth century, the gold rush was in full swing out in California, and it brought people from all over North and Central America and beyond, and nearly two hundred fifty fortune hunters from Panama boarded a ship named the Niantic. Now the Niantic was originally built in Connecticut and was quickly finding that this would be a

very lucrative business transporting people to California. So this ship was originating out of Panama bound for San Francisco, and the ship made it to San Francisco safely, and all the passengers jumped on out to search for gold, and shortly after that most of the crew left as well. In fact, each day that passed more crew were deserting the ship, and the crew were just convinced they had a better chance of making their fortune if they looked for gold rather than, you know, try and sail on

a boat. So they the owners had a couple of choices. They could try to recruit a new crew, but that was hard to do. Everyone wanted to go search for gold. Or they could just say, yeah, how about we look for gold too, So they made the decision to beach the vessel at the corner of Clay and Sandso Streets. Now these days that intersection is about five blocks away from the piers at San Francisco. However, back in eighty nine they were part of the shoreline for the city.

The Niantic became a store for a little while. Then it was built into a hotel, like you had the front of a boat sticking out of this hotel. But the Great Fire of eighteen fifty one burned the ship down to the waterline, along with much of San Francisco. The city rebuilt, and they used a lot of the debris and rubble to create a landfill, and they built the shoreline out. It extended out several blocks from where it had been, and the remains of the Niantic were

buried underneath the new Land. So under that intersection there are the remains of the ship Niantic. What does this have to do with the company, Well, it's you know where the name came from. But otherwise I admit that this was a tangent. However, I thought it was way too knee to pass up. Why should Nolan Ben get all the fun over at ridiculous history? The story of the company itself, you could argue, would begin with Google

right around twenty ten. And I should add that there are a series of articles on tech Crunch written by Greg Komparek that were absolutely pivotal for my research. Komparek did an amazing job and I'm just gonna lightly skimmed the surface of some of the stuff he covered, So I highly recommend checking out those articles if you want to learn more. They are behind a paywall, but you know, good content is worth paying for anyway. I also should

add I don't have any affiliation with him. I don't know him, never met him, but I really like these articles. Let's get back to it. The Google of twenty ten was a bit different from the Google of today. It was well on its way to being a mega corporation that was already in the cards. It had already launched Android, it had already released Google Chrome, it had purchased YouTube, but Eric Schmidt was still CEO back then, and the company had incentives in place to encourage employees to innovate

and work on things outside their normal work projects. In fact, until Google had an official policy that said employees could use up to twenty percent of their work hours to work on their own projects, many of which would evolve into official Google projects or get incorporated into existing ones. The company also encouraged employees to come up with startup ideas,

turning Google into a sort of incubator for startups. It gave employees who had ideas the support they needed to experiment and see if their concepts could be viable businesses, and most importantly, it kept them at Google. They wouldn't just, you know, leave to go and do it themselves. One of those employees was John Hank, who, spoiler alert, would go on to found Niantic. And Hank's story is a bit more complicated than just saying he was a Google employee.

He actually worked for a different company that got fired by Google several years earlier. In fact, let's spend some time to learn about Hank. He was born in nineteen and he grew up in Texas. He attended Cross Plains High School. He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin to get his undergrad degree, and a few years later he enrolled in grad school at the University of California, Berkeley. That's where he earned his m b a. He also worked at three d O as a producer for a

couple of years. I did a full episode about three d O last year titled The Tragedy of three d OH. So I'm not going to go into a full rundown of what happened at that company here, However, I'll give you a quick overview the three d O. The console was really more of a set of specifications, which meant that the company behind it created the design for how the console would work from a functional standpoint, but then they licensed that out to manufacturers who would then make

their own version of that console. Ideally, this would mean you could buy I in a version of the three d O console form you could buy it from like LG or Pana Sonic or whatever, and each version would have its own look to it based on what the manufacturer made, but they should all be able to play the same games that have been made for the three

D O platform. Unfortunately, this business approach failed to catch on, and not long after Hank joined the team, the company was all but extinct, but Hank co founded a new company called The Big Network and served as its chief operating officer. The Big Network served as sort of a nexus of casual games online stuff like you know, puzzle games, card games, trivia games, that kind of thing. It was meant to appeal to a wide spectrum of people, not

just those who refer to themselves as gamers. The company aimed to create an interactive online space where people could get together and play these games. Not long after they founded The Big Network, another company came around with an acquisition offer. That company was e Universe, a retail company that mainly sold music and video media. The company would go on to become Intermix Media, Incorporated, which would arguably be best known for being part of one of the

worst acquisitions in tech history. That would be when Rupert Murdock's News Corporation acquired Intermix for more than half a billion dollars around two thousand five, and that was mostly because Intermix happened to own a little social media site called MySpace. But of course we know that deal didn't work out so well for dus core, but this isn't a story about them. And anyway, the e Universe acquisition of Big Network meant Hank, as a co founder, came

into a decent amount of money. His next venture was to co found a new company called Keyhole, and even that is oversimplifying things a bit, as Keyhole itself grew out of a separate company called Intrinsic Graphics. And I know stories are complicated, all right, So Intrinsic Ethics existed independently before John Hank got involved. It was a pre existing company and the company's main goal was to create

a cross platform video game engine. So, in other words, it would be an underlying technology that would allow game developers to create games on top of it, and those games could run on different types of machines like Mac and PC and game consoles, which would mean that game developers would be able to create games, or at least the foundation of games that would then be able to run on all these different systems in a more efficient way than just contracting the job out to some other

company to make a port of their video game. Well, one of the things that Intrinsic Graphics made was a demo in which you could see a zoom dealt view of the Earth and then you could zoom into it like a lot. You could go from an orbital altitude to a satellite view of your home. And the demo was a really big hit. In fact, it was big enough that Intrinsic Games decided to spin off the demo

as the cornerstone of a new company. That company would be Keyhole, the one that John Hank would join right at the start in two thousands, so he was a co founder. Though he came into the team, he was not part of the Intrinsic Graphics group. So Intrinsic Graphics made tools that could work on multiple platforms, but that tool was really expensive and it was ahead of its time.

Other companies would later make this their core business, but at the time in two thousand it was really untenable, and Intrinsic Graphics faltered and shut down in two thousand three and sold off its assets. But the leaders at Keyhole were able to spin off from Intrinsic Graphics and they were able to keep things moving by themselves. However,

it wasn't easy. The company was not generating a ton of revenue, and from the sound of things, was flirting with following in intrinsic Graphics footsteps and shutting down prematurely. Keyhole landed a few contracts that kept things moving, including one with the US Central Intelligence Agency or c i A. But it was really touch and go for a while, and then Google decided it just had to have Keyhole, and Google pounced on it in two thousand and four, and that is how John Hank became a Googler. He

went along with Keyhole to Google. Now. According to Hank, he thought he would be at the company for about six months, and it turned out it was more like a decade. Keyhole would become the core of the Google Earth product, and Hank, over time would go on to oversee Google's GEO products, so stuff like Google Maps and Google Earth. And that brings us back up to the

year twenty ten. That was the year that Google CEO Schmidt announced that Marissa Meyer would shift her focus from the search division at Google to the GEO division, and Hank felt like he was in a bit of a squeeze. He was already overseeing that division and felt that there really wasn't enough room from a leadership standpoint for both Meyer and himself. And one of these days I'll have to do a full episode about Marissa Meyer, because she

is a very important person in technology. She's been involved in some pretty massive stories, some of them really rocky ones. But I should also add that Hank never criticized Meyer. He said he actually thought she was a really good leader, a good boss, and he liked her. But his concern was that her job and his job would overlap so much that he would largely be made redundant, like there wouldn't be enough work for the two of them. So Hank announced in January eleven that he was going to

depart Google and the GEO division. So his original plan was to resign from Google and concentrate on creating some sort of new business. Larry Page Over at Google didn't want to see Hank leave. Google never wants to see people leave if they can help it, unless it's on Google's terms, So the two set down to talk things over.

Hank spoke about an idea he had that would marry two of the things he had worked on in the past, gameplay and geolocation features, so this conversation would include elements that would ultimately find their way into the game. Ingress and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. Page convinced Hank to do that work to create geolocation games with an element of augmented reality to them. Within Google itself. The company would create the environment within which

Hank could develop his idea. So Hank agreed to stay on with Google. This coincided with work being done by others at Google who had been trying to create that incubator program I mentioned earlier. See Google had this problem with developers leaving to go and do their own thing. After a while, people would get experience, they would build

up some wealth at Google. Then they would resign and go found startups so that they could do whatever it was they were passionate about, and they would be totally independent from the old company. And losing talent is always tough. The vacuum that's left behind is hard to fill. So Google had a vested interest in creating ways for people to pursue startup ideas without you know, actually leaving the company.

Hank's project would be one of the early ones. Hank got a budget, and a deadline of two years to bring his startup idea to fruition. The parties agreed eventually to a contract extension, so it went out a little beyond two years, and Hank made certain that when the time was up, when this expired, no matter what state his startup might be in, he would be the one who would have the authority to say if the group we're going to stay with Google, or if it would

spin off to become its own thing. He was able to get that assurance. His project included people who had worked with him way back in the Keyhole days, but it also included lots of other people as well, people who found the idea of creating a company that may games that mixed augmented reality and geolocation applications together to be really compelling. So Nanti Labs came together, but it

did not have that name yet. One of the earliest projects the team worked on was a proof of concept game they called Battle s f As in San Francisco, and the idea was that you would go visit physical locations in the city of San Francisco, and you would use this game to link your physical location to your in game location, and you would use a virtual military force to try and take over the area you were in.

Your physical location determined where within the game you were, so after a successful attack, you might walk a few blocks and try to take over that neighboring region. Other players could try to take over your territory, so you had to revisit locations to defend yourself or shore up your forces. As a game, it was fairly bare bones, but it was really interesting and the team felt reas heard that they were onto something. But Battle SF was far too limited to be a viable public release. I mean,

I just checked. Uh. It turns out that there are a lot of people, um most of them, as it turns out, they don't even live in San Francisco. But the group was just getting started. I've got a lot

more to say, but let's take a quick break. One fun story that compart It covers in his piece about Neantic is that the internal gain that Battle SF also gave rise to neantics first cheater, and the story goes that one employee figured out how to trick his phone into thinking he was at a different physical location than his real one. It's called spoofing, or it's a type of spoofing. There's actually lots of different types of spoofing.

It all involves tricking technology and to think you are somewhere or someone else than you really are, and this would be something that Meantick would have to deal with further down the road. It's a common issue with games that involve geolocation elements, and there are a lot of different ways to do this, to use tricks that convince your device that you're actually somewhere other than where you really are. In fact, I even did this myself way

back in the day. It was so that I could participate in a game connected to the J J Abrams Star Trek reboot. That game required you to visit real world locations in places that were, let's say, inconvenient to my home in Atlanta, So I cheated because I wanted to see what else the game had to offer. Otherwise I would have had to travel out to California a lot, and while I like California, I don't like it enough to jump on intercontinental flights multiple times if I don't

have to do it. Anyway, this employee was spoofing in order to play the game late at night, but not actually going to location, so this person wasn't getting up at one in the morning to go across town. They were just using different tricks to have their phone think they were across town. And that was an early queue to Niantic that this could be something they would have to keep in mind in the future. Next on the timeline was a game project called field Trip. This idea

was to locate places that might be interesting. Perhaps they could be an art installment, or it could be a historic building. You know, it could be anything that is worth looking at and knowing about. But they would be kind of like hidden gems, stuff that you might not be aware of because you never happened to look that way. And then they wanted to map that data against users typical routes. So let's use my typical route as an example.

So when I go into the office, which admittedly I don't do nearly as frequently these days, but when I do go in, I walk there, and it's a three mile walk from my house. Takes me about an hour to go there. One way. My walk takes me through a pretty funky part of Atlanta called Little Five Points, and then I end up connecting to a big pedestrian and cyclist path called the belt line, and I take that up the rest of the way to Pont City Market, which is where our office is. So to go home,

I just walked that same path, but in reverse. Now there's some interesting things to see along my pathway, but there could be a lot of other stuff that I would find fascinating or enriching that might just be a block out of my way, or maybe down an alternate path that would still get me to work more or less at the same time, but it would bring me

through areas I otherwise wouldn't see. That was the goal of Field Trip, to create a product that would encourage people to explore a bit off their normal beaten path. The team partnered with a publishing house called Arcadia to create a database of interesting locations, but then they needed to geo tag those locations. It was one thing to know about them, it's another thing to link them too physical locations in the world and have that represented within

the app. Ultimately, they had to manually geo tag these locations after attempts at automation fell short. That actually limited how much they could do because it is hard to operate at a global scale when it's falling to manual tagging. But it was in this process that they learned about the Niantic, the ship I talked about at the top of the show, so that's when they took their name from that ship, and they officially became known as Niantic Labs.

Field Trip would launch as a smartphone app in although originally it was supposed to be a Google Glass app, but Google Glass obviously did not take off quite in the way that people had hoped, so they were able

to pivot and make it a smart phone application. However, the user experience wasn't um It wasn't particularly well designed because users found that as they were just trying to go from one place to another in their daily lives, their phone notifications kept going off to say things like, hey, you should really go this way a couple of blocks,

and that became more disruptive than interesting. So while people thought the idea was cool, the actual experience became something of an irritation, and folks would tend to turn the app off after they lived with it for just a little bit. But this was a learning experience for Niantic.

Field Trip, like I said, launched in twelve It was by most estimates of failure, but the team learned a lot, and they realized that by combining elements of Battle SF and things they had built into Field Trip, they might make a compelling game that reaches beyond San Francisco. So the idea was that it would be a real world

multiplayer game played through smart phones. The game would have two factions, and players would have a choice of joining one or the other and try to swing control of regions in the real world to their own faction that would be represented in fiction through the smartphone, so both an augmented reality and an alternate reality style game. The control points where you would actually try and do this would center around interesting places in the real world, kind

of like Field Trip. So in other words, the real world exploration elements of Field Trip would match with the regional control gameplay of BATTLESF. And the result was a new project of the group titled Ingress. The plot behind Ingress sounds like it comes from a Neil Stevenson novel. A research institute discovers a new kind of matter called exotic matter, or XM. The two factions have a fundamental disagreement about exotic matter. One side, called the Enlightened, wants

to exploit XM to Humanity's advantage right away. The other side, the Resistance sees x M as a potential existential threat that could lead to humanity's extinction and does not want to go down that path, at least not immediately. And when I played, I played as enlightened. These days, I might actually side with the Resistance anyway. That was the basis for the game, which launched in late twent Gameplay centered around in game sites called portals, which were anchored

to real world points of interest. I remember walking to work and I would play this game. I would interact with portals along the way and try to take them from the Resistance. As I made my way to the office, my trip takes me past a lot of murals and street art, much of which had been tagged and put

into the game as portals. Controlling portals would give one faction more control over a region than the other faction had, and I saw control shift several times, though I played the game for a few months before I kind of fell off of it. The original version of Ingress is

no more. Niantic sunset it in September two, nineteen, but an updated version with a slightly different backstory launched in this one's called Ingress Prime, and the story of the game actually incorporates the original Ingress game into it as part of its own canon. So, in other words, Ingress Prime says, there was a game called Ingress, but that game was really a cover for what's really going on. There are layers within layers and the illuminatis behind it all.

I tells you, Okay, not really, but you know, it's kind of that that flavor. But getting into the fine details of all the game stuff would require numerous episodes to explain that plot, and I'm not sure I can really follow all of it, and none of it really matters as far as explaining the evolution of Niantic and the tech that the company used. So we're going to just, you know, jump past that. But let's talk about the

tech for a second. So these early projects like Battle, sf Field, Trip, and Ingress all had elements of geolocation and augmented reality incorporated into them, and the a R stuff was a bit more subtle than what I typically

think about when I hear the term augmented reality. Now, I don't know about you, but when I think of a R, I think about wearing some sort of headset or special glasses, and I think about looking at the world around me and seeing it transform in some way through digital overlays on those lenses that are acting like transparent displays. Maybe I get a data redoubt of the area around me. Maybe I'm seeing on screen directions that guide me to my next turn as I go to

a different location. Maybe I'm seeing a list of businesses that are inside a particular building. Maybe I'm looking at a historic representation of what my surroundings would have looked like a century ago. You get the idea, I'm seeing some sort of digital augmentation of my view of the world. But if I take my glasses off, I just see the world as it really is around me. Stuff like field Trip and Ingress were a bit more subtle when

it comes to augmented reality. In the case of field Trip, it was more about giving you digital information that would nudge you to explore your surroundings a little bit more, perhaps allowing you to come across an interesting location you otherwise would have just passed right by. It wasn't so much about augmenting your experience at your location, but rather inviting you to explore. Ingress would do a similar thing,

but couched it in the form of a game. You would see within the app where nearby portals were, and once you've got to those physical locations, you could then interact with the portal within the game. But those physical locations were also the sites of interesting stuff, So if you took time to look up from your screen, you could potentially you appreciate something you might not otherwise have seen. It was an augmented reality, but it wasn't hitting you

over the head with it. And it was all made possible by the fact that the Neantick team could geo tag locations and the users smartphones that how's the game had GPS capabilities. That combination of having a system that could detect where players are in the world and then guide those same players to interesting locations in that world, that was the heart of ingress, the story and the conflict. We're all window dressing. It was interesting and sometimes convoluted

window dressing, but still window dressing all the same. And it might help if we think for a moment about how GPS works now. In the old days, before smartphones had GPS receivers, location information relied solely upon signals from cell towers, a phone would ping out to nearby towers and receive a response. And towers are stationary, having the established location, so those are anchor points. You know exactly where they are right. They don't move around, so they

have actual, you know, location data associated with them. The amount of time it would take for a signal to go from a tower and arrive to the phone would give your phone an indication of how far away you were from that cell tower. If you get a pin from a couple of cell towers, you could have a rough estimate of where you were in relation to those towers, but it's not the most accurate way to determine physical location.

It can give you a rough idea of where you are, but you might be off by a bit, like in some places like a city with tall buildings that interfere with signal propagation. A little bit could be a couple of blocks, which is not terribly useful if you're doing things like you know, using a ride hailing app. If the app thinks you're you know, two blocks west of where you are, you're not going to see a car stop for you because the cars stopping two blocks away.

But what about GPS, Well, the global positioning system is made up of two dozen satellites, plus you know some standbys that provide a global coverage of service. The coverage means that any time your receiver is within the line of sight of four of those satellites way up in orbit. That's good because you need three satellites to find your position on the Earth's surface. These satellites rely on atomic clocks, which keep time with incredible precision. They also have to

factor in the effects of relativity. To get into all of that would require another episode, And in fact, I've done episodes about satellites and the effects of relativity, So I'll just say that stuff like gravity and the speed at which you're moving relative to some other body affects the relative passage of time between those bodies. Getting more

into detail would require another episode. So these satellites regularly send out little signals to Earth, and each signal includes the time stamp at which it was sent out by that satellite. So the GPS receiver in your phone gets a signal from satellite number one, it's got a time stamp attached to it that tells your phone when that signal was sent. The signal had to travel a really

good distance to get to you. So by the time it gets to your phone, your phone's clock, which also has to be really accurate in order for all this to work. Your phone's clock sees how much time has passed between when the signal was sent and when it was received. You take that difference in those times and you multiply that by the speed of light, and while you now know how far you are from satellite one, but that doesn't give you a location, It just gives

you a distance from that satellite. So now you get data from satellite too, and that tells you how far away you are from satellite to Knowing how far you are from these two satellites creates a range of locations that you could potentially be on the surface of the Earth, but you need a third satellite to reduce that range

to a specific point on the Earth. Technically speaking, there are two points where you could be in relation to those three satellites based on this data, but one of them happens to be out and outer space, so we can just discard that one for most of us. Most of us are not astronauts, so we just ignore that and we only focus on the location that actually makes

contact with the surface of Earth. It's through comparing the data of how long it took the signals from these three different satellites to get to your phone that your phone is able to figure out where you are, which is pretty nifty stuff. When we come back, we will continue to learn about Neantic's story, but first let's take another quick break. So Neantic launched Ingress and it saw some modest success, and it seems weird for me to

call it modest. The app had more than twenty million downloads, but when we look ahead and we look at Pokemon Go, that number seems quaint by comparison. Neantic even began to crowdsource potential locations for portals within the game. Remember, those portals were linked to physical locations in the real world, and they were supposed to be once that had some

sort of cultural or social significance. So users who had good standing inside the game could submit a location as a potential portal, and usually that included a GEO tag and a photo of the location. Neantics team would review the submissions and determine if they fit the criteria to be a portal, and if they did, they added it to the list of locations. Tied to the game world, and now you had a new spot where you could

battle the other team for dominance. The Neantic team also did some real groundwork when it came to getting player feedback. They would organize little real world events to attract players to specific locations, and then they would just talk to those players and find out what they liked or didn't like about the game. Gradually, Neantic would build these events up to go well beyond just user feedback. They became in game events that could affect the actual game itself,

and they took place in the real world. It would bring together the community of players, and the company would use this same data in its next big project. But it was around this time that Neantic was closing in on the end of that agreement with Google, the one that would prompt a decision about whether the team would stay on with Google or they would spin off to become an independent company, and the future was uncertain in either direction. At that point, Neantic wasn't really making any

money Ingress was not a huge revenue generator. They did use some ad revenue, and I'll talk more about that in the next episode, but it wasn't exactly raking in the big bucks, So there was a chance that if they stayed with Google, Google might just shut down the project or incorporate bits of it into the work of other Google products. That kind of stuff happens all the time at Google. I've done episodes about projects that Google launched and then later shut down, so that was a

real possibility. However, spending off would mean that the company, Niantic, would need to get investors on board to help cover initial costs. Plus there was the question of how to deal with the patented technologies that Niantic had developed while it was part of Google, because Google was listed on those patents. So in either case, either option was, you know,

kind of a little scary. But then people at Niantic had a killer idea, the idea that would not just make Niantic a viable business, it would turn Niantic into a true phenomenon, a breakout success, a multibillion dollar company. And it all had its roots in a joke, an April Fool's joke in fact, so back in the Google Maps team launched their April Fools gag. If you're not familiar, Google over the years has done multiple April Fools goofs and jokes, and the Google Maps teams in particular tend

to have some really good ones. There was one year where it turned Google Maps into a game of pac Man. So if you pulled up a map of your location, all the streets would become pathways that you could guide your little pac Man player down and ghosts would chase you. It was really clever. But this year team was different.

If you opened up Google Maps on April Fools, you would see Pokemon hidden throughout the maps, and if you clicked on the Pokemon, or if you were using a smartphone, if you tapped the Pokemon, it would add them to your collection. And if you collected all one fifty one of the little critters, Google would send you a business card with your name on it and the title Pokemon Master. To promote the joke, the team released a video that showed people in real world locations seeking out their Pokemons.

It was a gag, but it was a gag that gave the Niantic team the inspiration to pitch the idea for a real life Pokemon game, one that would have players go out into the real world to seek and capture Pokemon. It wasn't long before Niantic put together a team, including a member of the Google Maps team who had actually worked on this April fool's joke, and they headed to Japan to meet with executives at the Pokemon Company.

They pitched their idea and they also showed off Ingress to the execs to give them an idea of how the concept would work, and before a week had passed, they got word that the Pokemon Company wanted to pursue the possibility of making such a game. One thing the Pokemon Company really wanted, though, was a more streamlined and simpler form of gamel A Ingress got a bit dense, and that would possibly be a barrier to entry for

new Pokemon players. And this was a decision that was probably for the best because the Niantic team was really leaning towards spinning off from Google at this point that

had not actually happened yet. The Pokemon deal started while Niantic was still under the Google umbrella, and the process of splitting from the mothership was a complicated one, and it also meant the size of Niantics team was effectively cut in half because not everyone was ready to leave Google to join a startup company, especially a startup company that did not yet have a successful revenue track record behind it, and for very similar reasons. It was challenging.

In fact, Niantic found it impossible to get enough investors on board to cover costs. Miraculously, the Pokemon Company executives did not pull the plug on the project once they learned that Niantic was playing thing to spin off into its own company and separate from Google. Heck, the Pokemon Company actually increased their investment in the project in order to help out, as did Nintendo, which itself had a substantial stake in the Pokemon Company. Niantics spun off from

Google in October. That meant that Hank would have spent more than a decade at Google, which is a pretty good stretch from the six months that he had originally imagined the Pokemon Company. And Nintendo fronted twenty million dollars to Niantic in order to work on Pokemon Go, with another ten million dollars promised once the company hit certain milestones. So the Pokemon game largely focused on a few pretty

simple ideas. Players could move around the world and find these little Pokemon monsters wandering around their physical locations, but they could do that within the game. It's not so magical that you can actually, you know, see these fictional critters moving around in your real world, but you could see them through the app of your game, and then

you could attempt to capture said Pokemon. Capturing them would add the Pokemon to your collection, and Jim's g y M s that's the Pokemon's version of Ingressive portals would become places where the factions within the Pokemon world could battle it out in order to try and control the space.

Many features were planned that weren't part of the initial launch, such as the ability to battle other Pokemon trainers directly in head to head contests, or to trade Pokemon critters maybe you captured one and your friend needs one you want to trade. That was not supported at launch, and some of the game features at launch would actually need reworking. But despite losing half the team once Niantics spun off from Google, the young company was able to launch the

game less than a year later. Pokemon Go went live on July sixth, two thousand sixteen, kind of because then it crashed and came back up, then crashed again. You see, Pokemon is a pretty darn popular I p which is putting it mildly. There are numerous video games in the Pokemon franchise, all of which are on Nintendo consoles and handheld devices. There's also a trading card game. There are numerous toys and other types of merchandise, and all of

these things sell incredibly well. People who grew up with a franchise frequently have a deep love and nostalgia for it. They also tend to be younger than I am, so I admit I don't totally get it. But demand was really high. In fact, it was too high. The crush of people trying to sign up for the game and get into the game and play the game overloaded Giantics servers, or more specifically, the servers that Giantic was renting in

order to run this game. They were actually using Google Cloud services for this, so the company spent a lot of the early days just trying to get servers back online and adding more machines to the system in order to handle the load. According to Niantic, the demand was about fifty times higher than their worst case scenario projections.

Let's let that sink in for a second. Imagine that you are an app developer and it's getting close to launch day, so you need to estimate the demand for your service so that you have the right assets in

place to handle the workload. Now, you don't want to overestimate, because then you're going to be dedicating more assets than what you actually need, which means you're spending money when you don't need to, and spending money, by and large, is something that businesses like to keep a tight lea shan. I mean they'll do it, but like they're totally not happy about it. So you don't want to rent more

servers than you need. For example, So you estimate how many downloads you think you're going to see within a given amount of time, like the first couple of weeks, and then you take that estimate and you pad it out. Maybe your app will make the news cycle, right or maybe it's going to be a featured app on an app store and you might get a boost that way. So you want to make sure you can handle any

extra adoption. So you look to put in place more assets than you think you're actually going to need, but not by too much. That way, if it turns out you underestimated things, you've still got some breathing room. Niantic tried to do that, but they grossly underestimated the rapid demand of Pokemon fans. And by grossly underestimated, I mean that at peak demand, they were looking at figures that

were fifty times larger than those worst case projections. Heck, even people who had never once played a Pokemon game like yours truly signed on to play this one. I mean, I had played Ingress and I thought that it was neat, but the idea of stumbling across virtual pokeman's out in the real world and being able to capture them really appealed to me. So I was an early adopter. So the company started to beef up the back end, and meanwhile, as they rolled out the service to other countries, they

saw the same story. On repeat, demand was so heavy that servers would get overloaded and crash. It's almost a good problem to have, except it is a problem, and the longer it takes you to fix the problem, the more people you're gonna see drop off the service because of the experience they had or black thereof. So it's also a problem that ultimately takes care of itself if you're not careful, But it takes care of itself in the bad way, in the sense that, well, now you're

not overloaded because nobody's using your service anymore. You don't want that to happen. So to solve this problem, called up his former workmates over at Google. The game was running on Google Cloud servers, and Google was a stakeholder in Niantic. When the company spun off from Google, Google retained a and a share of ownership, you know, a

percentage of ownership in Niantic. So with some cooperation, they saw more core servers joined the project, and the game finally had enough resources to meet the demand from players. According to people inside Google, this was a really big project on their side too, and it was obviously this game was a huge initial hit. If you lived in

a city, you likely saw evidence of this yourself. Maybe you were playing the game, in which case you probably encountered lots of other people who are also playing it, or maybe you just noticed that there were a lot more folks just kind of wandering around with their smartphones out and gathering in public spaces. They were everywhere. I remember my walks home included seeing a lot more people out and about, and sure enough, many of them were

clearly playing the game. I remember back when I was still playing it that I was trying to take over a gem from my faction. When a group of hoodlums by that, I mean some nice people were probably ten years younger than I am. They stopped across the street and they clearly contested me for that same gym, and I'm happy to say that those jerks one anyway, it

was also becoming something of a safety concern. I mean, the whole philosophy behind these games included that idea that you would get out into the real world and that's where you would, you know, interact with reality. You would see really interesting places, you'd get to appreciate art and

architecture and history. But in my experience, it was far more likely that you would see people looking down at their screens and then just rushing from one place to the next without you know, looking up to see what they were actually at, including when it came time to

cross the street, no joke. Some cities even took to writing along curbs to remind people to look up and pay attention to traffic, and some of them, like in in Los Angeles, I think it was they even included Pokemon imagery in that those messages to remind people, hey, don't just step out into the street without looking, because people were being a little bit unsafe about the whole thing. The title was clearly a huge hit and there would

be a lot of consequences that would follow. I will soon do a follow up to this episode to talk more about Pokemon Go and its impact and its revenue model and the other projects that Neantick has tackled in recent years, to talk about, you know, the other stuff that they have done and how they've become a multibillion dollar company. H A lot of that can be pointed directly at Pokemon Go, but we'll cover that more in

the next episode. Meanwhile, if you would like me to cover a specific topic in a future tech Stuff episode, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW. That's how we got these episodes. I love to hear your thoughts and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.