It is genuinely hard to believe that it has been a year already since Pokémon Go took the world by storm (and dominated the headlines for a good portion of July 2016, too). Now that the game has simmered down somewhat and established itself, it can take a few moments to celebrate its birthday.
To mark the occasion, a special Pikachu is running around the place (perhaps in your neighborhood!) wearing Ash’s baseball cap. It makes us wonder what Pikachu did to Ash, but in the meanwhile, you’ll be able to acquire this limited-time pokemon until July 24th. To date, over 125 billion pokemon have been caught by players worldwide.
In an interview with The Verge, Niantic CEO John Hanke said that the game’s enormous success initially worked against its continued development: “We lost probably six months on our schedule because of the success of the game. Really all the way through November and December [2016], from launch onward we were rebuilding and rewiring infrastructure just to keep the game running at the scale that we were running at.”
Check out our report card of the game’s first year if you haven’t read it already! Or heck, read it again even if you did!
