Pokemon Go: City hosts Pokemon walk; Rekindles 90s time

Taking the Pokemon Go fever a notch higher, the city hosted its own Pokemon walk with ‘trainers’ hunting down the rarest of the digital creatures to add to their kitty of ‘monsters’.

Organised by Performers’ Consortium, a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to put together heterogeneous art forms of unconventional structure, the “PokeHunt: India Gate” commenced at 5 pm and continued till 7.45 pm last evening.

“The hunt began at around the canopy in the India Gate area which had pokestops around and people could collect as many pokeballs as they wanted, after which we took the alley between the High Court and the National Gallery of Modern Art, to Pandara road via Zakir Hussain marg, finally culminating at the Pokegym at the Khan Market,” Manu Kamath, co-founder, Performers’ Consortium said.

The augmented reality game, which was first released in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is now available in more than 30 countries has turned into a global phenomenon. Although, the game is yet to be launched officially in India, it has already taken the country by storm and gamers are playing it by downloading the APK (Android application package) file.

In all, there are 151 unique pokemons that can be caught globally, although there are some that are exclusive to particular regions like, ‘Farfetch’d’ in Asia, ‘Kangaskhan’ in Australia and New Zeland and ‘Mr Mime’ in Europe.

Also, there are nine elusive of these digital monsters - Ditto, Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Mewtwo and Mew - regarding the existence of which within the game there is no available information as of now.

The “Poke Hunt” which was created on Facebook as a purely whimsical act, garnered immense popularity. The hunt began at the starting point with nearly 40 people and many other joined in at different locations.

Their post on the social networking site read, “This is a meet-up for all excited and nostalgic Pokemon 80s, 90s, 00s kids/teens/adulting adults. India Gate has many Pokemons, PokeStops and a PokeGym! This is a chance to unite and play the game together. We will have a few surprises and lures awaiting the PokeHunters!”

“We had created the event on Facebook just like that with absolutely no idea that it would become so popular,” Kamath said.

While organisers had previously decided to provide participants with maps detailing the location of pokemons, the event turned out to be more “spontanoeous” where people would rush to a particular spot as soon a monster was located.

“We had planned to provide people with crowd sourced maps from those who have been playing the game at these locations to guide the trainers about what pokemons can be found where.  We had planned a lot of things, but we ended up guiding them ourselves. It was more spontaneous and turned out better than what we had expected,” Kamath said.