Thousands of ‘Pokémon Go’ Players Descend on Times Square to Defeat Mewtwo

The air in Times Square on Thursday evening is electric. Not only because it's raining and thousands of Pokémon are virtually flinging attacks like Thunderbolt and Hyper Beam at the legendary Mega Mewtwo Y, but also because nearly 2,000 real-world trainers found themselves at one of the largest in-person Pokémon battles in history.

The event marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Pokémon Go, the mobile game by Niantic that took the world by storm in 2016. The game—a mixed-reality hunting game that plays out in real physical locations as viewed through the players’ phones—attracted more than 130 million downloads in its first month and a record peak of 232 million active players the same year, generating nearly $1 billion in revenue.

Niantic’s effort to turn it into one of the first mobile “forever games” has been successful, with more than $6 billion in lifetime player spending, according to Statista. Last year, Niantic was acquired by Scopely—one of the largest mobile video game publishers in the world, with titles like Monopoly Go! under its belt—for $3.5 billion.

Right before its debut, the game's first trailer promised all sorts of capabilities that weren't available at launch. The video showed players trading Pokémon with friends, battling other trainers, and, at the very end of the clip, a swarm of trainers making their way to Times Square, where every billboard has been taken over to visualize a massive fight against the formidable Mewtwo. Yet in 10 years of live Pokémon Go Fests around the world, the company has never re-created that scene—until now.

“We sort of made promises to players on the type of game that this was going to be,” says Michael Steranka, vice president of product at Scopely, who has worked on Pokémon Go at Niantic since 2017. “Now, 10 years later, when we look back at that trailer, we feel like we've actually delivered on a lot of the promises made there.”

Invites were sent out to 2,000 Pokémon Go players across the five boroughs of New York City through community ambassadors. (The event was made an invitation-only affair to avoid overcrowding in what is already one of the busiest places on Earth.) The players only knew about thematic raids happening in the vicinity of Times Square, according to Mark Van Lommel, Scopely’s director of marketing communications.

At a certain time in the evening, notifications went out through the game asking ticketed players to head to Times Square for a special event, where they were treated to a live EDM concert by Loud Luxury, after which Mega Mewtwo Y took over the many screens and a united battle kicked off. (Mega Mewtwo Y was ultimately defeated.)

The event was livestreamed on all of Pokémon’s websites and social channels, and this weekend a special Pokémon Go Fest Global virtual event will bring the same Mega Mewtwo Y gameplay experience to all trainers, sans the Times Square screens. “Everyone around the world can play that for free this weekend,” Van Lommel says.

Scopely says more than 800 million people have played Pokémon Go over the past decade, with more than 1 trillion Pokémon caught to date. In 2024, it had more than 100 million active players, and in 2025 it generated $1 billion in revenue. Daily engagement from active players is around 45 minutes, and players have walked more than 62 billion miles hunting for PokéStops and Pokémon.

Kim Adams, vice president of Game Development at Pokémon Go, says that in the last two years, the company has gone from 50 community ambassadors—vetted volunteers who lead and organize local real-world gaming groups—to more than 3,000 around the world.

For live events—a marquee feature that makes it unique among other mobile games—Pokémon Go sold nearly 1 million tickets in 2024. And since last year, the company says, it has seen double-digit engagement growth, with daily playtime up 10 percent and real-world exploration up 29 percent.

The capacity to handle thousands of players simultaneously participating in a raid hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Howie Ragunton, a US Federal Aviation Administration worker who has been playing the game since its release in 2016, says he remembers the first 2017 Pokémon Go Fest in Chicago, which was a disaster due to overloaded cell networks and unstable servers. “They've learned throughout the years,” he says.

Ragunton met his wife playing the game and proposed to her recently at a Pokémon Go event in June. He says the game changed his life, as he started playing it right after moving from Texas to Chicago for a job. “The game helped me socialize; it made me go out, and that's kind of what I love about it,” he says.

Since he has to travel a lot for his work, he spends a lot of time in the Niantic Wayfarer program, nominating local landmarks as Waystops in the middle of America, which can transform into PokéStops in Pokémon Go that other players can visit to collect in-game items. He doesn't get paid for it, but he can get some in-game freebies for his volunteer work.

This fan-collected data can also help improve Scopely's other games, and Adams says it's why the company prioritizes community feedback. “We are nothing without all of those people who contributed to the game in that way; we are in service of them.”

“Pokémon Go has helped me stay sane,” Ragunton says. “I don't work at big airports all the time; I work at these airports that don't even have passenger flights—they just have private flights—but they're in nowhere places, in small towns. But Pokémon Go is always there.”

Will it continue to be there for the 20th anniversary in 2036? Steranka says the Pokémon intellectual property has definitely helped the game keep its momentum. But he says it's the in-person communities the game has fostered over the past 10 years that will help it keep going for the next decade, so the plan is to continue investing in those spaces and helping create more core memories. Importantly, the goal is to continue building Pokémon Go as a multigenerational game.

“I will go out to a park with my mom, who's turning 70 next week, my wife, and my two kids, the oldest of whom is 3-and-a-half years old, and all of us can enjoy Pokémon Go together,” Steranka says. “Maybe the exception is my 6-month-old.”

Steranka says the mobile game is one of the first touchpoints people have for the Pokémon universe, and one of the development challenges is creating beloved features for all age groups. He wouldn't share what's on the horizon for the franchise—whether the company would dabble in hardware again—but he says if there's a technology that makes sense for Pokémon Go, the “world-class” engineers will be on it.

“What we don't want to do is adopt technologies for the sake of adopting technologies," Steranka says. "But if we feel that something has a genuine opportunity to make the game better, make the experience better, make the immersion better for our players, then that is something we are going to be exploring and investing in.”

Adams says now, after 10 years of a respectful relationship with The Pokémon Company, and now under the management of Scopely, the company feels “supercharged" for the future and plans to double down on its key differentiator—the community.

“People right now need more joy in their lives,” Adams says. “Life can get particularly hard, and if I'm standing in the grocery store line and some Pokémon can brighten my day, I'm not the only one. To them and to us, it's not just a game.”