Niantic chief marketing officer Mike Quigley (left) and CEO John Hanke, in front of a Dr. Who phone booth at company headquarters.
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How Pokémon Go will benefit from Niantic’s lessons from Ingress on location-based game design

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 22 min

Niantic Labs was an oddball startup within Google.

Conceived by John Hanke to promote exercise and an appreciation of public art, Niantic created a location-based game, Ingress, that worked on Android smartphones. Players from two different factions could converge on public spaces and battle for control of them. The game grew and grew, thanks in part to live events where the players gathered to battle each other with smartphones. It grew to millions of players, and that drew the attention of Nintendo.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.