Biography | John Hanke — The Hall H Panel That Proved Pokémon GO Was Already Everywhere

Hall H at the San Diego Convention Center holds about 6,500 people. It is the room Comic-Con reserves for the panels that will overflow anything smaller.

On 24 July 2016 John Hanke walked into it for a session first booked, days earlier, into a 480-seat room.

Pokémon GO had launched in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand on 6 July. By the second week of the convention the game was already being called the biggest mobile launch in U.S. history.

Organizers moved the Niantic panel from Thursday to Sunday and from Room 25ABC to Hall H. The title on the schedule was Re-Imaging Reality: Bringing Games Into the Real World With Ingress and Pokémon GO.

Hanke had founded Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, named for a Gold Rush ship that ended up in San Francisco, and spun the company out in 2015 with money from Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company.

Ingress, launched in 2012, had already turned historic markers and public art into a live map. Those player-made points became the first wave of PokéStops.

At the Hall H session he told the room that trading and later generations of Pokémon were in the works, and that keeping servers up was the immediate job.

Gage Skidmore photographed him that day from the floor. Those frames are the public face of the moment.

The convention center still sits at 111 West Harbor Drive. Hall H is the south exhibit hall, not a shrine to the game.

What happened here was simpler than the download numbers. A mapping executive from Cross Plains, Texas, stood in the largest room at Comic-Con because a game built on a real-world map had already left the screen.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (John Hanke at San Diego Comic-Con, 24 July 2016).