Pokemon Prank

So today is April Fool's day in the year 2014. This year Google decided upon an amazingly fun prank for all of its fans and all of the fans of pokemon. Google put pokemon across Google maps and told people that they can search all of Google Maps to find them and collect 150 to become Pokemon masters. However, since that includes the entirety of the world and starts with the area surrounding a Pokemon center in California, many pokemon are elusive and hard to find. I could only find about sixty of them and searched many states and state capitals. Almost all of the ones I found, including repeats, were in California. Since the map had to be zoomed in to at least 200m scale to see most of them, the search was very difficult for me. I looked all over most of southern California and parts of Mexico (Mexico unintentionally for the most part) and still couldn't find most of them. I honestly had no idea where else to search in the world and zoomed over to Hawaii, Australia, and Japan to search in depth. It could just be because I was on my phone and zoomed in so much that I had a hard time collecting a large number, although the game was designed for smartphones.

It is really innovative that Google is reaching out to fandoms and people of a wide age range. They are not just marketing to children who are new to Pokemon and may have access to smartphones, but they are also reaching out to people in their twenties, maybe even thirties that crave this kind of nostalgia fuel to power through the month.  Google has the right idea in mind when marketing a fun and temporary game such as this to the masses because it not only shows that they pay attention to what people want, but spend their time thinking of good ways to actually interact with their users.

I really wanted to collect them all and become a Pokemon master, but I know that wasn't possible since I had so many obligations to do today. I spent at least three hours dealing with a bike sale alone. Then I had to clean the house and run some errands. I cannot wait to read up on how many people were actually able to successfully become Pokemon masters, if it was possible at all.

Since the Google Game ends in a couple of hours, I might log off soon and try to finish as soon as possible and see what number I actually rack up by the end. I have three more hours so please wish me luck~!

Thank you for reading~