Biography | John Hanke — The High School on North Main Where a Texas Town Learned to Code

Cross Plains High School still stands at 700 North Main Street, a working public campus for grades 7 through 12 in a Callahan County town of fewer than a thousand people.

John Hanke finished here in 1985.

English-language profiles put his birth in 1967 and his childhood in this town, thirty miles north of Brownwood on the road toward Abilene.

A Japanese biographical summary says he was born in Austin and taken in by a farm family in Cross Plains. The documentable pin is the school, not a birth ward.

The town already had a literary map. Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian, wrote a few blocks from this campus.

Hanke kept that fact close. Later colleagues noticed a Conan poster in his office, a private reminder of a public place.

He taught himself to program on the machines of the home-computer era, first a TRS-80 and an Atari, then school projects that included analysis software for the basketball team.

Talks he later gave at Berkeley described a town with one blinking light, a Dairy Queen, and not much else to do.

The work that followed — satellite maps that let a stranger fly down Main Street, then games that sent millions walking through real streets — starts with a student who had to invent his own entertainment.

Cross Plains Independent School District still runs this building. A visitor will find a campus, not a shrine.

The Dairy Queen and the blinking light remain the landmarks Texas Monthly used when it came looking for the man behind Pokémon GO.

What changed is the map. Anyone, anywhere, can now zoom to this block.

Hanke built the tool that made that possible. He first learned to write code on this street.

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