ABSTRACT
John Hanke, CEO of mobile game company Niantic, pedaled his way through the streets of San Francisco. Game Freak, founded by Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori in 1989, released its first Pokémon game for Nintendo’s Game Boy in Japan in 1996. The game was an instant hit, selling one million copies in Japan by September of that year. Pokémon was later released in the US and Europe. The viral spread of Pokémon Go was owed largely in part to the original Pokémon sensation that had affected most millennials and was still present in younger generations. It is common belief that most mobile users who downloaded Pokémon Go were driven by some degree of nostalgia. In the first month following the release of Pokémon Go, however, Niantic seemed largely unprepared for its success. The servers that Niantic had dedicated to the app quickly grew overwhelmed under the large inflow of users.
