Here’s What Happened At The First Pokémon Go City Spotlight

Around two weeks back, Pokémon Go revealed that it was planning to launch what it calls the City Spotlight Initiative. Under this event, Trainers could go on an adventure in their very own hometown, or at the least, some place nearby. The general idea was that the event would provide Trainers around the world a new way to experience their city.

Exciting as that may be, developer Niantic announced that the City Spotlight event was going to be tested in four cities. You can read more about that here. So how did everything go? Today we take a look at just that.

While four cities were scheduled to take part, a post by the Pokémon Go team revealed that only the cities of Auckland, New Zealand; Busan, South Korea; and Tainan, Taiwan, participated. Still it appeared that thousands of Trainers took part. The City Spotlight only lasted for eight hours, but check out what some of the achievements were:

• Trainers caught nearly 3.58 million Pokémon.
• Trainers completed over 415,000 Timed Research tasks.
• Trainers took over 792,000 snapshots while completing the Timed Research tasks.
• Trainers completed over 34,000 AR Mapping tasks.
• Trainers earned 669,000 hearts with their Buddy Pokémon.
• Trainers each walked nearly 11 kilometers on average.

Indeed, those are pretty interesting numbers. Trainers were even able to take some shots and share them on social media. If you look at the milestones again, you’ll probably notice one new activity, which is AR Mapping. Well, it seems Trainers did a pretty decent job when it came to completing the AR Mapping tasks for their cities. According to the team, “cans created during these tasks will help us introduce exciting, new features in the future, and we’re grateful for the continued support in our work to create cutting-edge experiences in Pokémon Go.”

The City Spotlight Initiative also included some city versus city competition, particularly for AR Mapping. It was the city of Tainan in Taiwan that won this one, which resulted in a bonus event for the city. So what is this bonus event? From November 28 at 10:00 AM to November 29 at 6:00 PM, local time, Trainer in this city benefit from a one-quarter Hatch Distance bonus. How’s that for a bonus?

What about you? Excited to see your city become part of this initiative? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.