A decade ago Spanish devs made a game like Pokémon Go
Well before Pokémon Go, years before Invizimals - and any sort of AR or geo-positioning craze for that matter - both inside the lab at Gamelab and on the streets of Asturias, creatures were being caught with a mobile phone with players on the go.
Iván Fernández-Lobo, director of what back then was an idea factory, an actual lab for games, a "sandbox we used to try and foresee what was coming next", told Gamereactor about a project called Pocket Adventures, which is rather similar to Nintendo and Niantic's current success story.
In Pocket Adventures players had to go outside, use a PDA or a cell phone along with a GPS device connected via Bluetooth (because when this was developed, between 2004 and 2005, geo-tracking technology wasn't as embedded in mobile technology as it is today), and while they were out and about they were catching creatures.
The project reached an advanced stage of development, and was even turned into a functional demo. Thanks to some maps of the area ("from I don't remember whose database," Iván jokingly points out), the team managed to run a demonstration on the streets of the beautiful town of Mieres, during which two teams faced off under the supervision of a game master who tracked every player's steps (multiplayer interaction and live chat included, features not even implemented in Pokémon Go as yet).
However, the lack of proper funding after the first pitch prevented this from becoming anything more than a testament to the talent and foresight of the developers, and a technical project registered for the Univerisdad de Oviedo.
For more information on the actual project (in Spanish), Gamereactor Spain was given access to the full documentation for the project and is running a more comprehensive feature on Pocket Adventures.
<bild></bild>