Depending on your level and direction of nerdiness, you may be interested in this interview with Niantic’s Director of Software Engineering Edward Wu. Wu talks about how Pokémon Go grew out of the success of Ingress and Google’s cloud services but ended up being a much, much larger beast than even the team anticipated.
“So just to give you the sheer sense of scale– I mean, it’s almost beyond comprehension, you know, the collective effort that people have put into not only playing this game. But actually when you think about all that walking, is the exercise and exploration, and meeting of new people that they’ve done in the midst of it. From a more technical perspective, to give you an idea of how much bigger this was than what we expected, it was roughly 50 times greater than the capacity that we actually had planned for at launch,” Wu said.
Wu said that over 88 billion Pokémon have been caught so far, with the playerbase collectively walking far enough to shoot past Pluto. Rumor is, Mewtwo is hanging out there and can be caught by the most determined player astronauts.
