A wild Pidgey appeared.
The trainer reached for a Pokéball, the instrument used to capture Pokémon like the common, bird-like Pidgey. The Pidgey hovered in front of him.
He let the Pokéball fly, and the Pidgey burst into light, then disappeared into the red-and-white ball. The ball shuddered once, twice, a third time, then stopped. The Pidgey was caught.
“Just a stupid Pidgey again,” the trainer, 27-year-old Robert John Erickson of Belchertown, said. “They’re everywhere.”
Everywhere, but also nowhere. Erickson was playing Pokémon GO, an augmented reality smartphone game that’s the latest pursuit for the successful Pokémon franchise — and its most integrated into the world beyond the small screen.
The game incorporates the classic elements of the franchise’s video games — players called “trainers” catch the creatures in the wild and battle them at locales called Gyms — into the camera and GPS capabilities of smartphones.
At a basic level, the game allows players to walk around in the physical world while looking at a phone display that shows a detailed map of their location — complete with Gyms and spots called Pokéstops where players can get Pokéballs and other items — that alerts them when wild Pokémon are nearby. When trainers interact with the Pokémon, they can catch them by swiping on the phone screen to send a Pokéball toward them.
Since its launch last week, the game has been a massive success. It has become a sensation on social media and rocketed to the top of app download charts in several countries. Monday, Nintendo, the Japanese game company closely tied to Pokémon, saw its stock leap, with share prices jumping 24.52 percent, the company’s best day since 1983. The game was created by game company Niantic, but Nintendo is a Niantic investor and played a role in the game’s conception.
The game is free to download, too, but players can purchase in-game items and upgrades. According to app tracking website App Annie, on Sunday, the game was the highest-grossing app in the iOS App Store.
The game has already seen a few highly publicized mishaps. On Friday, a Wyoming teenager discovered a dead body in a river while playing the game, and over the weekend, teenagers in Missouri allegedly committed armed robberies of unsuspecting trainers.
It also has drawn some online criticism for privacy concerns. The game requires players to register either with a Google account or with a pokemon.com one, and in some cases, players choosing the former have granted the app “full access” to their accounts — meaning the application could theoretically do anything to the accounts except for change their passwords, delete them or pay with Google Wallet. Some other apps, like Google Maps, have full access, according to a Google Support article, and the “privilege should only be granted to applications you fully trust.”
Even so, the buzz around the game has been largely positive. On Monday afternoon, local players were out in droves, and they extolled its virtues — how it taps into nostalgia, how it brings people together, how it gives some of them an excuse to get out of the house.
The woman had set out on a simple errand, but now here she was again — hunting Pokémon.
Heather Reese, 34, swiveled on the sidewalk outside Northampton Brewery as her best friend announced another capture.
“Holy crap, I got another one!” Amanda Winslow, 28, shouted. She’d caught her third Pokémon in two minutes.
Reese had downloaded Pokémon GO two days earlier, checking the game to see if she’d allow her 12-year-old son to play. Instead, she found herself sucked into the craze alongside Winslow.
Pokémon had been a part of their childhood — the frenzied card collection or anxious awaiting of the next game — but neither had expected to revisit it as adults. But the game had dominated their lives the last couple of days. It became a reason to take out the trash, walk the dog or go the long way home.
“It used to be, if you saw someone hanging around a particular spot and being weird on their phone, you’d be suspicious,” Winslow said. “But now when you see that, you think, ‘Oh, they’re playing Pokémon GO.”
The day before, the two women had ventured out in a light drizzle, hoping to head further down the street in search of new Pokémon. They wound up far from home as the drizzle became a downpour, and Winslow had to call her husband to come pick them up.
She said her husband was confused as to why they had gone for a walk in a storm, and made fun of them when he found out what they’d been doing.
“He’s older, so he didn’t play Pokémon as a kid,” Winslow said. “He just doesn’t get it.”
Winslow and Reese don’t mind. They’re happy to bring something they treasured as children back into their lives as adults.
On Tuesdays, the two normally do a wine and movie night. Instead, they’re going to pour the wine into to-go coffee cups and take to the streets to look for Pokémon.
A red car sped down Pleasant Street in Easthampton, its occupant glimpsing someone on the street looking down at her phone.
“Gotta catch ’em all!” the man yelled out of the car before racing off.
Minutes before, a group of five had stood in that same spot the car drove past, comparing Pokémon GO strategies.
Jess Bienvenue, an Easthampton resident who works at Aldi’s, was walking around hunting for Pokémon with her friend Christina Sinico tagging along when the girls ran into three guys, who appeared to be doing the same thing, standing at the corner of the Main Street Park.
“Are you guys catching Pokémon too?” Sinico, 31, shouted before approaching the group.
Joshua Howland, Tom Dudkaiwicz and Ryan Wing had indeed also ventured out Monday to play the new game on their phones. Sinico and Bienvenue shared thoughts about the game with the group of three friends.
Bienvenue, 29, said she knew about the app months ago and was anticipating its release. Sinico said they had been driving down the street earlier that day when Bienvenue would suddenly ask her to pull over.
“And I’m like, ‘don’t even tell me we’re stopping for Pokémon!’” Sinico laughed.
A fan of Pokémon since sixth grade, Bienvenue said she loves Pokémon Go for nostalgic reasons.
“Yup. Red and blue and yellow,” Howland, 31, said, nodding.
Meanwhile, walking down Union Street, 13-year-old Kristalynn Culver was fairly new to Pokémon. Her dad, Juan Perez, owner of a GameStop, introduced her to the app, and now the two keep it open on their phones when they walk from place to place.
Perez said he told his whole family about the app — Culver, his wife and his son — and he loves the fact that it gets them out and walking. It’s good friendly competition, too, and it helps the family meet fellow fans.
“You have to meet more people than you’d think,” Perez said. “As soon as you see someone walking, I’m just like, ‘Pokémon? Pokémon.’”
Phones out, Tyler Ward and Eric Lagacy strolled along downtown Amherst’s Boltwood Walk. The friends had driven from Ware for the day for the express purpose of playing Pokémon GO.
In their town, Ward said, Pokéstops and Gyms are rare. They took a break from walking to sit on a bench surrounded by a half-dozen nearby Pokéstops.
Dane Manderfield, 21, of Amherst, had just come from taking over a Gym at the Masonic Lodge on Main Street when he came upon Ward and Lagacy and joined them to talk about the game.
“Amherst is one of the best places for Pokémon right now,” he told them. In addition to its dozens of Pokéstops, there are Gyms at West Cemetery, the parking lot next to Amherst Cinema and several spots on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, Manderfield said.
The trainers talked shop. Ward had just hatched a Tangela from an egg he’d acquired in the game. Manderfield said he’d walked 64 kilometers — the game can track that progress — in three days. In his travels, he had met other trainers — they’re easy to spot, with their phones out and start-stop pace.
“It’s bringing nerds together,” he said.
And as they talked, even more trainers joined the conversation. Some stopped to talk for a while. Others, like married teachers Amanda and Eric Johnson, exchanged knowing greetings with the crowd.
The Johnsons, who live in Belchertown, were walking downtown with their children, 2-year-old Laureena and 3-month-old Alec, who was asleep in a carrier on Eric’s chest.
Amanda, 36, had never played Pokémon before GO’s release — “I scoffed at anything Pokémon,” she said. But she was tempted to download the game after seeing a Facebook post from a friend whose husband had been asked by police to leave a park after it had closed. He’d been there after-hours to compete at a Gym.
Amanda has experience in geocaching, the outdoor activity where participants use GPS to find hidden containers. She said GO scratched the same itch, but without forcing her to go into buggy, secluded areas.
For Erin Daly, the youth services coordinator at Chicopee Public Library, Pokémon GO is fun, but it’s also a way to connect with the kids she works with.
“I play a lot of videogames, because I always want to know what the (popular) thing is,” Daly, 34, said. “My colleagues and I were talking on Facebook about how we all started playing it to know what our kids were up to.”
Then something broke her train of thought.
“Woah – Pidgey!”
Jack Evans reported from Amherst, Taylor Telford from Northampton and Alexa Chryssovergis from Easthampton. They are Indiana University journalism students working as Gazette interns this summer. When they’re not playing Pokémon GO, they can read emails sent to: jackevan@indiana.edu; aachryss@indiana.edu; ttelford@indiana.edu.