Pokémon Go

I picked up Pokémon Go earnestly around Nov 2016, going around farming nests by myself, and then intensified while dealing with my tinnitus-induced depression at the start of 2017. I became closely involved in the centralised London community, IRL from Jan 2017 to mid 2018, and in a more local and online capacity from then until March 2020, quitting around the start of the first covid lockdown and pivoting to speedrunning (I was never in it for the gambling so decided to go full-on skill-based competitive gaming)

Archive: a repository of my communal PoGo stuff, including pics from a meetup, galleries for the AR competition I ran, raid data, and a funny cheating dossier from my time as a mod

Bots

I was known for innovating notification bots for rare spawns, built on top of the maps that were being used to track them at the time. I wrote about them on my programming website:

→ Bots

Moderation

I was a moderator for the Pokémon Go London Discord during Apr–Dec 2017. I set up and maintained the website, ran the AR competition, and maintained a lot of bot and data-related stuff.

Events (2017–18)

The three days that I remember as among the best of my life are:

• 4th Feb 2017: going out in central London with an unlimited transport pass to chase down rare spawns on a 30-minute timer (I ended up breaking into Regent’s Park for my first Hitmonchan, twisting my ankle and limping to it about 30s too late).
• May 2017: spending a day in Holland Park farming Machop and hanging out casually.
• 28th August 2017: a day by myself with a borrowed bike from my friend, both farming and chasing down rare spawns with my notification bot, to complete the Gen 2 dex. Down in Southfields/Wimbledon – King George V and Wimbledon Parks, with sprints to many small gardens and across the Thames. I narrated the day and posted some pics on the London Discord 28th–29th Aug.

The second of these was the warmth of belonging to a community, the third was the freedom and sense of unbounded exploration and adventure, and the first was a kind of mix between the two. Other mems:

• Apr 2017, playing an old-school double-XP event at our storied meeting spot Needle, watching two players I knew turn level 40 (spot me in this video 10:09). I first crossed paths with the London community irl in Jan 2017 when Jiraiya (white beanie in the video) + xKyoshi (shiny Magikarp guy) from this video came to my ends at 2am for a Snorlax as part of a cross-London gym run, then came back 1h later when another spawned in the same place. My sense of adventure was jumping out past midnight and chatting to top players I’d never met before :). And my most vivid memory is the others trying to silence xKyoshi’s booming voice at 2am at the Hammersmith Bridge bus stop

xKyoshi was later banned while I was mod for being a sexual predator (spring 2017). A year and a half later, he was cancelled in the UK Smash Ultimate community for the same reason. The discussion in their main discord (#general + #text-to-voice) on the day (2018/10/15) is by far the funniest roast I’ve ever seen. He’d threatened to break G-P’s legs in years prior (I consider G-P the UK’s goat of SSB4/U events and one of my heroes) and to turn up to the smash venue (and later the PoGo gym) with his cousins in a van… to which during the roast, someone posted a Needle PoGo group photo and asked “IS THIS HIS COUSINS?” I fucking died lmaoooo

Another big part of the lore is that Kyoshi was the earliest adopter of my OG PoGo alert bot, and so the first communal version that revolutionised our community was run off his laptop until his final ban, at which exact point the guy who redesigned it was ready to take over lmao

• July 2017, when the game changed towards raids, the community increased in size about 5×, so there were meetups doing raid crawls in central London that amassed 100+ people, one of which I enjoyed a lot.
• Sept 2017, we did a friend group “midnight squad” meetup that was fun, with a mix of raids and hanging out in restaurants and bars.
• Jan 2018 involved an operation in Holland Park to do as many raids there to trigger a Mewtwo raid, which I was also involved in on the science/data side in trying to decipher how to increase our chances (spot my name here).
• Jun 2018 was one of the earlier community days, with a throwback to Holland Park and the amount of people that have historically converged there for Pokémon Go.
• Jul 2018, watching England win their football world cup QF vs Sweden with my PoGo friends :).
• Aug 2018, I speedran the Celebi quest and was among the first to get one, which involved a fun week of careful planning, exploiting glitches, and cycling up and down the river between Furnivall Gardens and Bishop’s Park to “walk” my Eevee evolutions.
• Aug 2018, I turned level 40 in Pokémon Go, the OG goal, and streamed it ceremonially on Twitch.

Many times later in life, particularly around trips to the Southbank Centre and other aspects of my music life, I walked by Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment and its bench, where we had many meetups, and thought back to all my old Pokémon Go friends from back when we had a tightly-knit centralised community in 2017

Later Days (2019)

Oct 2018–Mar 2019, I had a job where I lived in Hammersmith, and decided to retire essentially, doing hangouts, working tasks and working on my gyms, all locally

I spent most of my gaming energy in 2019 trying to get good at Smash Ultimate and playing tournaments in London, before packing in both that and PoGo at the start of the covid pandemic, to make a new home in the SMS speedrunning community