Pokemon Coming to Mobile Devices Next Year

Nintendo, The Pokémon Company and Niantic (Ingress) are working together to bring Pokemon GO to Android and IOS devices in 2016. Like Niantic’s mobile MMORPG Ingress, the game will make use of real world maps to allow players to find, battle, and capture Pokemon in the real world. The game will work in conjunction with a wristwatch peripheral named the Pokemon Go Plus which alerts players of events happening within the game so that players won’t have to spend as much time staring at their screens. Pokemon company president Tsunekazu Ishihara, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata all had their input on the game. While this isn’t the first time Pokemon has hit mobile devices (The Pokemon Trading Card Game has been available on iOS devices since 2012), this is teh first full fleged Pokemon game developed with input from Nintendo. If this goes well, it’ll be interesting to see how this influences Nintendo’s mobile strategy going forward.