Pokemon Go has already been such a runaway success that developers Niantic Labs are likely to sit down in six months and wonder how the hell they’re going to match its success.
Their free-to-play mobile game took a seemingly eternally popular franchise and combined it with real world interaction. Suddenly, millions of people that grew up playing Pokemon on the Game Boy, watching the cartoon and swaggering through the playground holding their shiny Charizards are getting obsessed all over again. But the Pokemon don’t exist in a fantasy world anymore, no – now you can run into a wild Snorlax on your way to Morrisons. It’s amazing.
So where do Niantic go next with this augmented reality-based, active real-world gaming concept that they’ve struck gold with?
The biggest TV show on the planet wouldn’t be a bad shout.
One of the California company’s product marketers, Archit Bhargava, has been chatting to Gamespot, and he’s already daydreaming about a Game of Thrones spinoff that brings Westeros into reality.
Bhargava was discussing the similarities between Pokemon Go and Niantic’s other social game, Ingress, when he said: “We’re not that worried about the effect that each game might have on the other, but what we’re hoping is that with both these games, the overall pie of real world games will increase. There could be a board game you could make in the real world where people are capturing locations like Risk or something. My personal fantasy is like a Game of Thrones game where Westeros is mapped out on Earth and you join House Stark or whatever.”
We have absolutely no idea how any of this would work. Can we challenge someone to trial by combat at the bus stop? Will hungry direwolves roam the high street? Who knows. They probably haven’t thought it through any more than we have, but if we’re going to have to join one of the families vying for the Iron Throne it’s not going to be Stark – we want to be Targaryens and we’re getting us a Drogon.
