Pikachu's out on the Streets: Pokemon Go Announced

Pretty soon, you could be finding Snorlax at your local chip shop or Meowth lurking next to a bus stop. It's all thanks to Pokemon Go, the new mobile game recently announced by Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, and Niantic. 

Essentially, it's an augmented reality game which uses your phone's GPS coordinates to create a game where you hunt, capture, and train Pokemon in the real world. While Pokemon Go will be free to play, there'll also be an optional device called Pokemon Go Plus - a wristwatch-like gadget that will connect to your phone via Bluetooth and notify you of nearby Pokemon.

Here's a look at it, courtesy of the official Pokemon website: 

Pokemon Go's being developed by Niantic, best known for another augmented reality game, Ingress. But the project's also being overseen by Junichi Masuda, the director and programmer who's been involved with the Pokemonseries at Game Freak since its inception in the 1990s. "He is hard at work ensuring that the fun of Pokemon makes its way into this new project, and is also looking to come up with new kinds of gameplay while thinking of ways to connect this project with the main series of Pokemon video games," the game's press release states.

While it's easy to be cynical about free to play games, the idea of hunting down Pokemon in a local park or at the bottom of a garden's a beguiling one. And yes, we're probably getting old and soppy, but we can't help smiling at the promo trailer (see below). The game won't look like this, obviously - we'd be stunned if great crowds of people flocked to Times Square to watch a Pokemon battle - but it's a nice (and expensive-looking) introduction to what is clearly going to be a major release.

Pokemon Go will be available to download for iOS and Android in 2016.

Gamespot