It Turns Out That Pokemon Go Was A Government Level Data Operation Disguised As A Children's Game. Tech Company, Niantic, Built The Most Valuable Map In History And Got Players To Do All The Work For Them
Ok a few things right off the top here-
1- This is going to be very, very long. Because the story is so crazy that it needs to be. If you don't like lots of words, turn back now.
2- I have read and asked more questions about Pokemon in the last few days than I would ever admit on the stand. But the more I read about this story, the less it made sense to me, so in order to figure out what the fuck was going on, I asked people I know who know and read as many articles as I could on Niantic and this whole ordeal. Which surprisingly weren't that many.
3- Watch the video above before diving into this.
@MarkGadala - This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.
Back in 2016, this thing called a "Snorlax" spawned somewhere in Taipei and hundreds of grown adults sprinted through city streets to catch it. Traffic stopped. People were trampled. A cartoon fat sleeping bear that does not exist and has never existed brought an entire city to its knees.
Here is video of it-
That's where this story starts. Right there. With the Snorlax stampede. Because that's the moment Niantic looked at what they had built and realized the users would do ANYTHING.
Anything.
Simple enough premise. You pointed your phone at the real world. A little monster appears. You catch it. You feel something. You do it again.
Before you know it you've walked four miles and you don't even care because the dopamine is flowing and there's a Charizard two blocks away.
At peak popularity in 2016, 230 million people were doing this every single month. A billion total downloads. People were quitting jobs over this. Skipping funerals. Wandering into traffic.
It was a genuine civilizational event built around catching fake animals.
And best part was it was completely free to download.
Free to play.
Totally free. No catch.
(Sidebar- There is always a catch. Remember this for later.)
In 2020, Niantic added a new feature called "Field Research".
The app would point you at a real-world location, like a statue, a storefront, a landmark, a fountain, or whatever, and ask you to walk around it and scan it with your camera. Do that and you'd get in-game rewards. Fake coins. Digital candy. Items that exist only as code on a server somewhere. AKA bullshit.
Apparently, players thought this was a game mechanic. Like a fun little side quest.
And sure why not? You scan the fountain, get the coins, and move on.
What was actually happening was one of the greatest data-collection operations in human history.
Each scan wasn't just a photo.
It was a photo PLUS exact GPS coordinates, camera angle, time of day, weather conditions, and player movement data.
And because millions of different people were scanning the same locations from different heights and angles and lighting conditions, the resulting dataset was extraordinarily precise.
Better than anything a professional mapping operation could ever produce because no professional mapping operation has hundreds of millions of volunteer employees who work for horseshit digital candy and coins.
They got fucking everything.
And I'm talking everything.
Sidewalks. Storefronts. Office buildings. Parks. Stairwells. Hallways. Schools. Every corner of human civilization, photographed from every possible angle, by people who unknowingly just thought they were playing a game.
(Sidebar- The terms of service, which nobody read, stated clearly that Niantic owned anything uploaded through the AR functions of their products and could do whatever they wanted with it including sell it to whoever they felt like)
THIRTY BILLION images.
Not million. Billion. With a B. Thirty of them.
The largest real world robotics perception dataset ever created.
"A more detailed map of human civilization than any government on the planet possesses". Built entirely by people who thought they were doing a side quest for fake coins.
Every neighborhood. Every landmark. Every building. Every fountain that some guy scanned on a random Tuesday afternoon because the app asked him to and he figured, "Sure, why not, what's the worst that could happen?"
This is what thirty billion "sure why not" moments look like when you stack them on top of each other.
They now have an asset worth more than most countries' military intelligence budgets, constructed voluntarily by people wearing cargo shorts and walking around like zombies while staring at their phones in public
Three and a half BILLION.
With a B again. Two B's in one blog. Unreal.
Because it turns out that when you own the most detailed geospatial dataset in human history, built for free by a billion unpaid volunteers over a decade, that's worth something.
Quite a lot actually.
Before pocketing their billions, Niantic spun off a separate company called Niantic Spatial.
VPS can pinpoint a location to within CENTIMETERS just by looking at nearby buildings and landmarks.
No GPS required. GPS gets confused by tall buildings and dense urban environments. VPS doesn't, because you already photographed every tall building in every dense urban environment from seventeen different angles while pretending to catch Pikachu.
Niantic CEO John Hanke explained this in the November 2024 blog post right above, "Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence." In it he announced they had trained more than 50 MILLION neural networks with more than 150 TRILLION parameters enabling operation in over a million locations worldwide.
Just sit with that for a second.
People didn't know they were doing infrastructure work. They all thought they were playing a game. But the data doesn't care what they thought they were doing. The data is the data and the data is now worth three and a half billion dollars and counting.
For context, the United States government has spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to build mapping and positioning systems of this caliber.
Niantic did it with a Pokemon game and a promise of fake candy. This is either the greatest business achievement of the 21st century or the greatest heist, depending on which side of the transaction you're looking at it from.
Niantic Spatial's first major commercial partnership is with Coco Robotics.
These little piece of shit pink delivery robots that scoot around city sidewalks bringing people their food. And those robots are now navigating using VPS technology powered entirely by your Pokemon walks.
(Sidebar- I fucking hate these robot machines with a fucking passion. And I don't see that ever changing.)
John Hanke actually said out loud to MIT Technology Review with a completely straight face that- "It turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco's robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem."
This man has never experienced a moment of shame in his life and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
These robots know exactly where they're going thanks to all this free data.
Now, here's where this story stops being funny and starts being something else entirely.
John Hanke didn't just wake up one day and decide to build a Pokemon game. This man has been building surveillance infrastructure his entire career and he has been very, very good at it.
Before Niantic, before Pokemon Go, before any of this, Hanke co-founded a company called Keyhole Inc. in 2001.
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The name alone says all you need to know. It was named after the old "eye in the sky" military satellites. The ones used for reconnaissance. The ones used for watching people from space without them knowing.
Keyhole built a program called Earth Viewer.
Guess what Earth Viewer became? Google Earth. And then Google Maps.
The thing on our phones right now that knows where we are at all times.
Now, here's the best part- "the CIA's venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, took a particular interest in Keyhole. According to a press release from the time, within two weeks of In-Q-Tel's investment, Keyhole's technology was implemented to support Pentagon operations in Iraq."
Two fucking weeks!
They didn't even let the ink dry.
The military had Keyhole's mapping technology deployed in a war zone within fourteen days of the investment closing. That's how useful this stuff was to people whose job is knowing exactly where everything is at all times.
Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 in a deal worth $35 million in stock. "Hanke joined Google as part of the acquisition and became vice president of product management for Google's Geo division, overseeing the transformation of Keyhole's technology into Google Earth and Google Maps." He also negotiated the agreement with Apple to include Google Maps on the iPhone.
So Hanke built the mapping technology the CIA funded. Then sold it to Google. Then turned it into the maps on every smartphone on earth. Then founded Niantic inside Google.
Are you following along here?
Stick with me.
Then Niantic built Pokemon Go. Then used Pokemon Go to build a dataset thirty times more detailed than anything that came before it.
Quite a series of coincidences continuing to happen in the tech industry involving the CIA.
In-Q-Tel's leader at the time of the Keyhole investment was Gilman Louie, a video game industry veteran with a decades-long relationship with Hanke. Louie currently sits on the board of Niantic.
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The former CEO of the CIA's venture capital arm, currently sitting on the board of the company that made Pokemon Go. That collected thirty billion scans of the real world from a billion unpaid volunteers.
I'm not telling you what to think about that. I'm just telling you what's there.
(Sidebar- Hanke also previously worked for the United States Foreign Service in Washington DC and overseas in Myanmar on "foreign policy issues" before going into tech. I'm sure that's totally unrelated to everything else in this section. Totally.)
There's a famous saying that- "If something is free, you are the product."
Meaning if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer. You're the inventory. You are what's being sold.
Pokemon Go was free.
Google is free.
Facebook is free.
TikTok is free.
None of these companies exist out of generosity. (And intelligence agencies have their tentacles in all of them)
And they exist because our data, attention, content, behavior, and most of all, LABOR is worth more than whatever we would have paid for a subscription.
Think about that.
This definitely isn't new. Companies have been running this playbook forever, Pokemon Go is just the funniest version of it because of the Snorlax stampede and the fact that they're cute little cartoons.
Google ran "reCAPTCHA" for years, those little boxes asking you to click on traffic lights to prove you weren't a robot, and used our answers to train their image recognition AI. Remember that annoying shit?
We were literally teaching machines to see, all for free. Because a website told us to and we did it because we wanted to check our email.
Waze also crowdsourced an entire real time mapping system from its users and Google bought it for 1.3 billion dollars.
Our commute data. Their acquisition. Bonkers again.
And now with fucking AI.
Every prompt anybody's ever typed into ChatGPT.
Every conversation somebody has had with a chatbot.
Every correction some coder makes when the output data was wrong. All they are doing is training data. WE are teaching the machine model. WE are the unpaid research assistant.
The AI gets smarter every time we interact with it and the company captures that interaction and uses it to improve the product they're going to sell back to us at a fucking premium next year.
We create the content. They own the content.
Then they train the models on the content. And then they sell access to those models. And we have to pay for the subscription.
The Pokemon Go players at least got to go outside and get some fresh air and touch grass.
The rest of us are training AI sitting on our fat asses.
Fun Fact- there are still around five million people playing Pokemon Go every single day right now in March 2026. Every scan they run is feeding back into the model. The dataset is still fucking growing. The robots are getting smarter by the day.
We are indeed the weakest link.