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Back in September of 2015, Niantic, flush with the long term success of the ‘Ingress’ AR gaming app, partnered with The Pokémon Company and Nintendo to create a new augmented reality game which it aimed to launch in 2016. For The Pokémon Company, the venture would be another great way to make people hunt down Pokémon by travelling far and wide and to popularize the concept of augmented reality even further. While it is not clear if the company knew it all along, Pokémon GO went on to shatter many records of mobile gaming and the app was used more than WhatsApp and Snapchat within the first month of its release. For the Pokémon company, the success isn’t new as it has cashed in over $45 billion in the last two decades through various means, and the company now wants people to get a glimpse of its glorious past by launching a new YouTube series named Pokémon Generations.
The Pokémon Generations series will include a number of short films- each between three to five minutes in length. These will be broadcasted on YouTube starting September 16th and may run for the next few months with new episodes being introduced periodically. Each of these episodes will feature facts about Pokémon games that have been released over the years as well as some memorable moments associated with such games. A group of games launched around the same time will make up one generation and by creating episodes based on generations, The Pokémon Company will introduce as many as seven generations to its fans on YouTube by November. Needless to say, YouTube makes it incredibly easy for users to share links to videos on other social platforms so the series’ popularity may benefit from the cascading effect in the coming months.
The Pokémon Company has been running a popular Pokémon anime series on TV since 1997, so fans should be careful not to confuse between the new series and the age-old one. Niantic, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company are now working on launching more augmented reality games as well as creating new platforms underneath existing games which can be used for other games. For example, Ingress created the foundations which were eventually used to create the follow-on game – Pokémon GO. With augmented reality gaining ground and Nintendo’s new ventures turning out to be extremely popular, it is possible that The Pokémon Company will find new reasons to add more generations to its YouTube series or follow-on ones in the near future.