Cast your minds back. They year is 2016. The time is last summer. Everyone has become obsessed with Pokemon again.
It is exactly one year to the day that the beloved tiny fighting creatures were thrust back into the limelight. It is exactly one year to the day that Pokemon Go was released.
The app had an immediately visible impact. You’d start to notice people, adults, on your morning commute trying to catch Pokemon. You’d see the same faces, in the same clothes as the day before, become more and more dishevelled, angrily mumbling to themselves as they’d fail over and over to catch a Caterpie. Wander around London during your lunch break, and you’d bump into at least 5 people glued to their phone, all chasing the same Snorlax. Nearly every pub and restaurant in the capital became a ‘Pokestop’, a ‘Pokemon Gym’ or a ‘lure spot.’ People would suddenly find large groups of teens congregating outside their house in the middle of the night – furiously yelling something about “Alakazam” like they were a death cult reciting some sort of alarming incantation by the bins in your front garden. The public became so frenzied in their quest to add the rarest Pokemon to their phones that crowds of trainers would regularly bring extremely busy roads to a complete standstill.