Have they caught on with us, too?

One month ago, people looking for Pokemon in the streets of Baku streets caused feelings of both contempt and surprise. Whereas a month later, nobody was surprised and in another month, all the residents of Baku aged 12 to 32 may possibly well be hooked on this game. Each of us will download the Pokemon Go app, and we will be running along Nizami Street, catching the strange creatures and looking at the world through our smartphone cameras.

There have been many reports on news programs about people being hit by cars or falling from roofs, people who caught up in playing this game. There haven’t been such cases in Baku yet, but skeptics say, the worst is yet ahead.

“Doctor, I’ve got a feeling that everybody chases me.”

Our gamers’ community is relatively small, though there are many more nostalgic Pokemon fans. However, they are not fans of the original hit-game on the GameBoy pocket consoles, produced by the Nintendo Company in 1996, but rather people who admired the TV series.

The 90’s generation remembers Dendy pretty well, but the news that it was the Chinese clone of the Nintendo Entertaining System (NES), came as a real shock to them. Obviously only a few people had heard about GameBoy. On the other hand, the animated series became very popular. Children diligently learned the names of all the 151 Pokemon. Many of them took the cancellation of the animated series as a personal tragedy (it was taken off the air only in the territory of the former USSR, though it is still running in the West and the number of episodes has already exceeded 800).

Its broadcast was stopped due to a scandalous episode, where strong flashes of light caused an epileptic attack in one of the people watching in Japan.

Produced in 2016, Pokemon Go has become a real social phenomena. The idea of uniting a real city with the virtual creatures was has been successful that the value of Nintendo’s shares increased by 20%, while game-related Google search queries exceeded those of pornography.

On a side note, there is already a special website for Pokemon-gamers in Baku- pokemongo.az. Ayaz Gajiyev, the website’s creator, says that Pokemon Go is a social game, and it would be interesting to bring together all the gamers to exchange their experiences and information. “Over 1,700 people visited the main page of the website on the very first day it was launched. To be honest, I did not expect such interest in my project; some posts have been even viewed more than 300 times.

The game is very popular both in our country and all over the world. Many companies around the globe use Pokemon as a mean to promote themselves, and that’s really cool that our companies have started ‘catching onto the wave’.

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Pokemon GO has hit hard against nostalgia. The boundaries between age has disappeared, as adults and children alike are wandering throughout the city, uniting into clans, looking for rare Pokemon and fighting with each other in order to, as much as they can, “conquer” the most amount of areas.
…as long as the phone doesn’t die at an inconvenient time.

Published: 24.07.2016