Pokemon Go is the greatest app of all time
Sitting in a sandwich shop in Kamas, Utah, waiting for a particularly cute waitress to bring me a chicken quesadilla, I watched three high school aged dudes cheerily studying their iPhones as they crossed Main Street. They looked downright giddy — like, giggling and skipping along as if they’d only just realized school was out for the summer. From nearly a block away, I could tell what they were up to. Those dudes were heading for the gym — the Pokemon Go servers must be back online.
To put it bluntly, Pokemon Go is the single greatest app ever invented.
It’s genius based on nostalgia alone. A generation of Buzzfeed-reading smartphone addicts was just given free reign to uncover and live out childhood Pokemon trainer aspirations. If you never once tossed a NERF ball at one of your stuffed animals as a kid intent on owning your very own loyal super-powered pet, you’re either under the age of 15 and missed out on the days of the original 150, or you’re trying way too hard to act cool right now.
If it’s the former, good for you, reading a newspaper! If it’s the latter, cut it out — nobody is above Pokemon. Maybe your parents wouldn’t buy you packs of Pokemon cards when you were in third grade, but it’s about time to put that behind you, because Pokemon Go is amazing.
Now, I never had a gameboy. The extent of my experience growing up with Pokemon was limited to getting home from school in time to catch the last five minutes or so of the cartoon. But after downloading the app over the weekend and catching my first undersized Charmander, I realized this was the closest any of us 20-somethings have been to “catch-’em-all” fever since Beanie Babies.
The game’s usefulness is so much more than a maturing generation’s unending search to hold onto the late nineties. Pokemon Go is a fitness app, an aid to those with social anxiety and a modern solution for getting kids interested in joining their parents for errands to the post office and the grocery store all at once.
I don’t mean to perpetuate the negative video game geek stereotype that’s existed since the ‘80s, because honestly we’re way past the Atari days. But it warms my heart to see gaggles of gamers gathering in clusters around city parks, alongside previously unnoticed or overlooked statues and monuments, and often several yards off of major roadways — probably trespassing, but not maliciously so.
People are getting outside and noticing there are actually semi-interesting things to do there. Social media has taken a short hiatus from photoshopping crying Jordan onto every physical surface on God’s green Earth in order to appreciate hilarious appearances of Pokemon in the workplace.
Pokemon Go managed to leapfrog the arms race for decent virtual reality tech by turning an iPhone camera with GPS enabled into a worldwide gaming map. It appeals to both young kids and adults who still feel like kids. There’s literally a function in the game that rewards players for walking 10 kilometers, meaning in just one weekend Pokemon proved to be the spark Americans needed to begin exercising and caring about the metric system.
Pokemon Go is simplicity, competitiveness and addictive gameplay wrapped in a nostalgia bow and delivered amidst summer tragedy by the friendly Japanese man who’s lived in the same house down the road since the release of the original Super Smash Bros.
With all the tumult that’s so far defined 2016, it’s nice to score a win every once in awhile. So thanks, Pokemon Go, for giving us a reason to get up and get out in the morning.