Chapter 24
Small Steps
Once something becomes successful, in retrospect it can seem like an overnight victory. When Pokémon Go attracted half a billion downloads in just two months, earning millions of dollars a day through in-app purchases and advertising, most people thought it was an instant success. But the origin of Pokémon Go actually extends back decades. Founder John Hanke started creating multiplayer games in 1994, at the time experimenting with online maps and photos, a project that Google bought in 2004, turning it into Google Earth. Once at Google, Hanke worked on Google Street View, and then created multiplayer games linked to maps. When a 2014 April Fool’s joke went viral—a video in which Google announced positions for Pokémon ...
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