Image via Niantic, edited by Amanda Kay Oaks
This weekend, I went to the park to chase Pokémon in tiny party hats as part of the Pokémon GO birthday celebration event. The event is a bit premature – the game won’t celebrate its actual eighth birthday until July 6, 2024. That means I get to feel weird about 8 years of Pokémon GO for just a bit longer.
Many Pokémon fans feel nostalgic for July 2016, often calling the “Pokémon GO summer.” It was indeed a uniquely cool time to play the game, and I have fond memories of chasing that elusive first Dratini with hoards of strangers.
But it’s not that fact that makes it feel strange to realize this mobile game has been out in the world for eight whole years, or close to it. For me, the game will always speak to a specific time in my life, one that feels at once longer ago and closer than eight years removed.
2016: The End of The Beginning of Adulthood
When Pokémon GO launched into the world, I was a girl in desperate need of a distraction. In truth, I hadn’t played a Pokémon game since before college. I no longer owned a single Nintendo device, and my relationship with the franchise had dwindled.
And yet, the former Pokémon fan in me seized the opportunity to fall back in love with something from my childhood. I’m sure I would’ve played the game regardless, but just then, at that moment, I needed something to pull me out of the present.
In 2016, the world I’d known seemed to be crumbling around me. If that sounds dramatic, please forgive the girl I was – two years removed from college, living in her first-ever grown-up studio apartment. For those two years, I served in AmeriCorps with a group of other idealistic young adults. We hung out every weekend, and for the first time in my life, I had parties to attend regularly.
The thing about AmeriCorps is that you can only get the biggest benefit (an education credit) for two years, max. So, much as I loved the work I was doing and the people I’d come to know from doing it, my time was ending. The job I’d gotten used to was going away, and much of the friend group I’d followed into young adulthood would dissolve as well.
On its own, that would’ve been enough to leave me feeling unbalanced, but life likes to throw more than one thing at us at once.
2016: My Summer of Grief
If I’m being honest, there’s a reason that Pokémon GO is the biggest thing I remember from the summer of 2016. In early July, I was very much still deeply enmeshed in my first true brush with deep grief. That May, my former college boyfriend passed away quite suddenly. Even though we’d broken up almost a year before it happened, the news hit me hard.
He’d been there as I built this life I’d soon be leaving. He’d sat on that couch, in that apartment where I lived alone for the first time in my life. That someone my age, who I had known so closely for a time, could just be gone wasn’t something I was ready to process.
May and June of that year are a blur of crying myself to sleep on the couch in front of episodes of The Mindy Project. By July, I was desperate to start being a person again, but I still didn’t really know how to process this strange loss that felt like it didn’t fully belong to me.
So, I picked up my phone, took a lot of walks, and caught a lot of little cartoon creatures superimposed onto the real world. Losing myself in that game, in a weird way, brought me back to the world around me. The Pokémon might not have been real, but the walks and the little interactions with other players were. I began to feel like a person again, in small ways, and I’ll forever be grateful to Pokémon GO for that.
2016: The Year I Moved to Pittsburgh
Not only was my AmeriCorps term ending, and not only had I recently lost this person I once knew, but I was about to lose my city, too. I’d applied to many MFA programs, seeing grad school as the next step on my journey to “Become a Real Writer.” I’d been accepted to only one, and it was five hours away in the strange city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Though I grew to love Pittsburgh, and later fell in love with it, those early months were hard. I was still reeling from so much change, from so much grief, and I felt unmoored. The new city felt strange and different, somehow massive compared to Cincinnati.
And yet, there was something familiar I could cling to. The apartment I rented was just across the street from a massive park, and that park was chock full of PokéStops and Gyms.
So there I was in this new city where I didn’t know a soul, following Pokémon around to learn my new surroundings. I missed the friends I played with in Cincinnati, but it was nice to have something to do during those long empty days before I made friends in my MFA program.
Pokémon GO saw me through one of the most difficult summers of my young adulthood, and it’s how I first got to know the city where I would live for several more years. Seeing that the game is turning eight years old this year is incredibly surreal.
I can hardly believe so much time has passed since that green IKEA couch in my studio apartment in Cincinnati. Some days, it feels like I might wake up and find myself there still.
So while many people say we’ll never recapture the feeling of that Pokémon GO summer, for me, it’s a memory steeped in so many complicated feelings that it’s hard to want to go back. I’ll forever open that app and think for a moment of the me I was in 2016. I’m grateful I was her, and I’m also so grateful it’s been eight years since I was.
Looking for more reflections on early Pokémon GO? Read about that time I went on the most awkward PokéDate of my life.
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