The worldwide phenomenon of Pokemon GO started a long time ago from John Hanke’s hard effort in building something great for the community. Niantic Labs became a popular name ever since the game came out, a name that no one has ever heard of before.

Did you know, that Niantic Labs was part of Google all this while? Well now you know, The Pokemon GO game that you know now of is part of John Hanke’s experience in handling Google Geo and Google Earth technology while he was working with Niantic Labs under Google.

Before Pokemon GO, its predecessor game was Ingress, a sci-fi game where players would collect items, interact with the augmented reality world and get into battles, much similar to Pokemon GO. In fact, most of the features of Ingress are implemented into Pokemon GO.

Niantic started inside Google to build location based apps with social components and its first app was called Field Trip, an app
where users can pull out data regarding cities and places with their phone.

Niantic’s CEO John Hanke had a fascination with massive online multiplayer games since 1994 where he started Archetype Interactive, according to Game Informer. It was developer for the online multiplayer game Meridian 59.