Google Maps Just Made Me a Pokémon Master

My entire childhood was essentially preparation for this. Not in a vague motivational-poster sense—I mean specifically, the Game Boy in bed past midnight, the Red and Blue cartridges swapped between friends, the obsessive fantasy of what it would look like if Pokémon existed in actual geography. Google Maps answered that question for April Fools 2014 by embedding wild Pokémon across the world map, catchable through the app. Pikachu somewhere in the Pacific. Mew hidden somewhere unreasonable. I dropped whatever I was doing the moment I found out.

It’s a joke. It’ll be gone in a day. But it works because for a certain generation the real-world Pokémon hunt was always the fantasy—the one thing the games kept promising and couldn’t quite deliver on a small screen. Google pulled the thread and the whole room lit up. I’m not embarrassed about it.