Niantic brought almost 2,000 people into Times Square this month to celebrate Pokémon Go’s 10th anniversary, coordinating a synchronized raid against a Mega Evolving Mewtwo as it took over the billboards. It was a direct callback: the original 2016 pre-launch trailer imagined exactly this — a crowd gathering in Times Square to catch a Mewtwo together. A decade later, they actually did it. Scopely VP of product Michael Steranka called it a vision that “was just a pipe dream” back then.
That’s the nostalgia story, and it’s a good one. It’s not the whole story.
The same week Niantic was staging that celebration, a different piece was making the rounds: Pokémon Go’s location scans have been training AI for military drone navigation. Niantic Spatial says the scans — roughly 30 billion of them, collected from players since 2021 in exchange for in-game rewards — weren’t handed directly to Vantor, the defense firm it partnered with in December 2025. What actually happened is more specific: the scans trained Niantic’s foundation models, and those models are what’s being integrated into drone hardware built to keep navigating when GPS gets jammed or spoofed.
Read those two stories side by side and the distinction Niantic’s drawing — raw data vs. trained model — stops mattering much. The mechanism is identical either way: get millions of people to walk around scanning the real world, for a reward, at a scale no survey team could match. That mechanism is what made the Times Square raid possible. It’s also what made the drone-navigation deal possible. Same asset, two audiences, and only one of them got an anniversary party.
This isn’t a gotcha. GPS-denied navigation is a real, hard problem — jamming and spoofing are common enough now that autonomous systems need another way to know where they are. A game that quietly built the best voluntary 3D map of human-populated spaces on Earth turning out to be useful for that is, genuinely, a remarkable second act. But it’s worth being honest about what “made good on its original promise” actually means here. The promise was never just catching a Mewtwo in Times Square. It was getting people to scan the world without thinking hard about what the scans were for.
Ten years in, Pokémon Go finally cashed in both halves of that promise in the same month. Worth watching whether the next decade of AR games are this upfront about which half you’re signing up for.
Sources
Pokemon Go 10th Anniversary Event Delivers on Its Original Promise — Next Reality (mirrors The Verge’s reporting; the original Verge piece by Charles Pulliam-Moore )10 years later, ‘Pokémon Go’ is as popular as ever — Fast Company’Pokémon Go’ Exec Promises 1,000-Person Times Square Mewtwo Event Is Just the Start of 10th Anniversary — VarietyPokémon Go data helped train AI now linked to military drones — The DecodePokémon Go data was used to help train AI systems being developed for military drones — PC GamerHow 30 Billion Pokémon Go Scans Became a Military AI Tool for Drone Warfare — UNITED24 Media