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A Group of Programmers Made Something Like 'Pokémon Go' at a 2014 Hackathon

"Open Pokémon" also features voice commands and integration with Leap Motion and Pebble smartwatches
Image: Image: Hack the North.

"Charmander, use Ember," Jack Gao shouts into his Android-powered smartphone. On a screen, the crowd before him watches as the popular orange pokémon complies and attacks the Bulbasaur opposite him, chipping some points from the latter's health bar. The crowd loves it. They cheer, they clap. It's clearly something they want.

"You can play in the real world with real people and real places," Gao tells the crowd, while also expressing his belief that traditional Pokémon isn't very social. "So imagine you're walking around the city, catching pokémon, battling wild pokémon, fighting your friends, and [visiting] gyms."

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Today, many of us can, and easily. But this is 2014 and it's the University of Waterloo's Hack the North competition in Ontario, and the stunning successes of Pokémon Go are still months off in the future. But Gao, along with colleagues Edward Yang, John Liu, and Kevin Nguyen invented the remarkably similar Open Pokémon for the 36-hour event. As you can see in the video below, it presages some of the successes to come.

True, Open Pokémon lacks Pokémon Go's simplicity, which likely plays a massive role in the success of Niantic's version. It also relied too heavily on voice commands, which is charming and all on a competition stage but would quickly get awkward and annoying while hunting battle pets through Central Park.

Yet like the current model, it uses Google Maps and featured pokémon that could be found in the real world. It was gadget heavy, but there were some charming ideas, such as an associated Pebble device involved in the physical act of throwing a pokeball to catch the digital critters and a PC application using Leap Motion technology. With the latter, players could pet and interact with their pokémon "in a real way never before seen in the world of Nintendo."

That's a lot to lug around, and it didn't even have the cool integration with the device's camera Niantic's version enjoys. But its gameplay was also closer to the spirit of "real" Pokémon than what we have in Go, and it's fun to see what could have been.

The app was one of the winners of the Hack the North competition for that year. Unfortunately, according to CBC News, Gao and his friends (who called each other the "Elite Four") did no further work on the app after the competition. A judge reportedly expressed interest in their work, but they weren't able to get in touch with him afterward.