Newsletter
Google is known for having a little bit of fun where ever they can, and they always manage to do something fun and crazy for April Fools Day. Last year they showed us one of their newest innovations called Google Nose, with the tagline ‘smelling is believing’, allowing you to utilize your smartphone to smell things through the screen using Google Search. While this was just one of the pranks we’ve grown to love from the search company, it was one of the funniest videos they had put out and was really good for a laugh. They also put up Google Treasure Maps, which was quite fun to play with as well. This year for the pranks and April Fools jokes, they have basically turned Google Maps into a giant world full of Pokemon. You can scroll around the map on your Android or iOS device and find Pokemon just hanging out in random places, and if you tap on them, you will get a chance to Catch it by tapping the little pokeball button in the bottom corner of the screen.
By catching pokemon you can then go back and view them in your pokedex, (for those unaware, the pokedex is a catalog within the game that shows you all your pokemon and the information about them) and tapping on each pokemon in your pokedex will show you data on that particular pokemon. There are 150 pokemon in total to catch within Google Maps for android, and you can find them all over the world just by zooming in on the map in larger cities. I found a couple in Portland, but there are literally tons in Tokyo and also quite a few around the Google Plex in Mountain View.
Catching the pokemon has never been this simple, but if you’re a fan of the game series the fun stops with simply finding and collecting them. Although that’s as interactive as it gets, it should put a smile on your face. If you want to keep track of your pokedex you can get back to it by tapping on the search bar within maps when it’s blank, and that will give you an option to open the pokedex or go back to the poke lab(google plex). See if you can catch em all.
