The Pokémon GO 10-year anniversary just brought a colossal Mewtwo to Times Square

Last night, if you looked up in the middle of Times Square, there was a colossal, glowing Mewtwo looming over the billboards. Pokémon GO is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and to mark a decade since the world collectively lost its mind walking into trees to catch Pidgeys, Scopely Explore (formerly Niantic) took over the world’s most famous intersection. It was massive, it was loud, and it was a perfect tribute to the game's roots.

If you were there for the initial hype cycle, you know exactly what this means. The original concept trailer for Pokémon GO ended with what felt like a pipe dream: a massive, coordinated crowd converging on Times Square to battle Mewtwo as a timer ticked down. At the time, it felt like pure marketing fantasy—a brilliant but impossible vision of what augmented reality could be. Last night, they actually went and did it, recreating the iconic trailer beat-for-beat in the real world.

I love that we are still doing this. The sheer scale of the takeover was staggering, but the real spectacle wasn't the giant psychic cat dominating the screens—it was the people on the pavement. Watching thousands of players stop in the middle of the Manhattan crush, phones raised to the sky, swiping furiously to take down a shared virtual boss, was genuinely thrilling. It was a flash mob with a purpose, uniting complete strangers over a digital monster.

We talk a lot about the magic of the summer of 2016, that brief, weird utopian window where everyone was suddenly outside, talking to their neighbours, and entirely obsessed with the same game. You can’t put that lightning back in the bottle permanently. But for a few hours in New York, that exact energy was back. The shouting, the frantic tapping, the collective groan when a capture failed and the cheer when it landed—it was all there, exactly as it was.

It was a brilliantly executed stunt, but it worked because it tapped into the very best part of what this game was always built to do. Yes, the spectacle is entirely virtual, a trick of screens and servers. But the shared experience of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of other trainers, caught up in the same fantastical moment, is incredibly real. Ten years on, that original promise hasn't just survived; it has finally been fulfilled.