John Hanke on why location unlocks the next wave of mobile gaming

hello so it's Pocket Gamer we're down in London we're actually in Google London and we were talking to John John do you want to introduce yourself why are you here in Google London what are you talking about yeah um I run a group in Google called Niantic Labs and we make a mobile game called Ingress and I'm actually in London uh I've been talking about the next game that we're creating which is called in game okay lot of information there but let's let's go back in time because you're not you have game maker in the past but you're best known for some signature Google products do you want to maybe talk a quick kind of uh background into why you're into this kind of um sure I came into Google in 2004 when Google acquired my company Keyhole and we made the core technology for Google Earth so I spent about seven years inside of Google building up the maps and Earth part of the company but more recently we've been exploring in Niantic the idea of combining location and mobile uh with games and making new mobile game experiences good so ingret

is a location based game is that is that the right description should it be bit more than bit more than location based game is it how how would you describe what Ingress is a mobile game that's based around location there's a deep story component that's told through social media and through YouTube um but yeah it's about movement and exploration in the in the real world and and narrative which is not something we've seen really from location based games before yeah I mean we reached out to um uh you know to social media and to YouTube We also do comic books and books as a way to tell a story and create a world for the mobile game to live in to kind of increase the emotional kind of resonance of the game I guess you could think of it as similar to like cutscenes in a typical video game but we felt that was a great way to kind of complement the mobile experience so this been in previous years has been a number of kind of location based games that have gained some sort of kind of Niche appreciation it seems to be a genre that to my view

anyway has kind of Fallen away a little bit but um you you kind of think it's still a lot of opportunity and maybe people haven't been making games location location based games kind of properly or in the most kind of uh in the best manner they could I mean I think whenever you see true Innovation you see fits and starts and you know you saw that with everything from the personal computer to the cell phone to the search engine to online mapping so you see early entrance that innovate in some way and then you see things that expand the concept and finally you see something that really proves it out and you see you know mainstream adoption I think with games that involve location I think the time is right I think the people have the right hardware and I think we've learned enough about how to make that experience that uh we're going to see some great compelling games that involve movement and location um we're seeing you know this convergence of things uh in the health and fitness side and wearable devices as well so I think you know there's a lot of interest in bringing these things together and new

fun experiences so the other thing with location based games is partly because a lot of the conferences are there whenever I've heard someone talking about a new location based game they'll fire up a map of San Francisco and go look at all the people in San Francisco playing my location based game but I'm clearly the world is not Bas in San Francisco so what's the kind of global spread of your players and other people interacting outside of the US and Western Europe yeah so we launched the game globally from day one so it's played in uh 200 countries around the world uh you can um look and an overview map of the product and see that people are playing in small towns and big cities throughout the world and Asia southeast Asia South America Europe the US and I think it's also really cool that those people are often communicating and collaborating socializing with one another even across these International boundaries we even see people traveling internationally as they're playing the game so it's really an international experience was that something you kind of designed in or you been surprised about that kind of kind

of I guess Community is probably the right word that yeah I was involved in making an MMO way back in the 1990s like ancient history but I had seen that kind of emergent social behavior of Clans and gills and all of that you know that that entails in MMOs I think that's what makes them fun uh so we were going for that with Ingress we felt like we were kind of setting the stage for that but frankly I've been really surprised at the degree to which people seem to like um having that kind of social engagement and meeting new people but in the real world you know which is really different than just meeting somebody and chatting with them online and we weren't sure that people would make the leap of wanting to meet and play with new people versus kind of their existing friends online but um people seem to really like it so we've been having actually Ingress meetups and events around the world and having really great turnout and people seem to have a lot of fun at them cool good so that's Ingress so that's kind of you got your iOS version coming out pretty soon as well so um that's kind of

exciting but you mentioned before you got another game that's kind of in the process of being developed the end end game correct so you can tell us not out for a while but can you what's the kind of idea how would that be different what's the yeah we're just beginning to work on it U the goal of Ingress was to ultimately end up with a platform we could give to other people to make similar kinds of experiences so endgame for us is a step in that direction ingame is a really interesting project it is the brainchild of a guy named James fry who's a US writer and uh he has created a world uh that uh will come out in the form of a series of novels the first of which launches uh worldwide at the end of this year yeah U that's called endgame and there's a Film Production uh component to that so there'll be a movie some time afterwards okay and there will be um our mobile uh game which uh takes place in that same world along with um an alternate reality game there will be uh characters from the fiction that sort of come alive

online and are involved in both the mobile game as well as the book and movie so it's a really cool kind know far-reaching project that kind of ties many of things many of these things together uh with you know a big budget movie and I think a great book series cool good excellent thanks for much you time awesome