How much of a phenomenon is Pokémon Go? Enough so that it's started something of a civil war between members of the team behind the video game sensation Minecraft.
See, when the game first launched, Mojang — the Sweden-based game studio that created Minecraft, acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014 — tried to get all employees to unify and join up with Team Mystic, Pokémon Go's blue team.
But here in America, the Bellevue, Washington-based Minecraft team was more split. Some of them were willing to go along with the Swedes, while others wanted to go with the red Team Valor or the yellow Team Instinct.
Amid the chaos, though, came inspiration: Spencer Kern, an artist with the Minecraft team in Washington, found himself getting very into Pokémon Go.
"After spending hours running around my local park with a few hundred people I knew this was a special moment in gaming history," Kern writes on a Microsoft Sway presentation explaining his project.
In the original Pokémon games that Pokémon Go is based on, players can run to a handy Pokémon Center in each city to heal up their pocket monsters and get ready for the next battle. In Pokémon Go, the thing that gets hurt more than anything in your smartphone's battery, as the game chews up power like nothing else.
"I thought it would be fun to re-create a Pokémon Center from the main games and use it as a charging station for trainers to hang out and heal their power drained phones," Kern writes.
And so he did, building an awesome project that doubles as something of a social hub for Pokémon trainers in real life. Here's how.
Since Pokémon Go was released in early July, hordes of players have gathered all over the country to hunt for the titular Pokémon in groups. It's that sense of community and unified purpose that really inspired Minecraft artist Spencer Kern.
"It has been amazing to watch people come together and enjoy catching digital monsters out in the world with their friends and neighbors. And after spending hours running around my local park with a few hundred people I knew this was a special moment in gaming history," Kern writes.
In the original Pokémon games, a Pokémon Center is where you go to heal your Pokémon between battles. Kern's big idea was to build a real-life Pokémon Center where players can "hang out and heal their power drained phones."
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