New Pokemon GO puts Valley gamers on the move

By JORDYN GRZELEWSKI

jgrzelewski@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

For the last few days, Boardman Park has been crawling with visitors of an unusual kind.

Pidgeys, spearows, weedles and other virtual creatures have been found daily since the launch of the wildly popular Pokemon GO app.

Players converged on the park – and other area hotspots throughout the Mahoning Valley – in droves to try to “catch ’em all,” as the beloved 1990s game urged them to do.

“Last night at 8 o’clock, at St. James Meeting House, the parking lot looked like there was a wedding reservation. The entire lot was filled,” park Director Dan Slagle said Tuesday, noting the park has had hundreds of additional visitors each day since the start of the weekend.

Asked whether the game has drawn more customers to their restaurant, a manager at the Boardman Chipotle simply laughed. “Yes,” he said.

AJ Vincent, 22, of Canfield found that out firsthand over the weekend.

“We started playing around with [Pokemon GO] and ended up going to Boardman Park. When we got there, we saw probably 100 people walking all around the park playing the game,” he said in a Twitter message. “Then we went to Chipotle for dinner and saw some people that were in the park. ... I bet half of the customers in Chipotle [that] night were playing the game as they ate. It’s crazy how popular it got.”

The popularity of the game also was apparent in the city’s downtown area. Groups of gamers roamed the streets this week, eyes glued to their phones as they launched Poke Balls at Jigglypuffs on Wick Avenue, or sent their virtual monsters to battle at “gyms” such as the Covelli Centre.

Pokemon GO – the most-recent installment of the Nintendo-owned franchise that first came out as a video game in 1996 – uses phones’ GPS technology to detect players’ locations and depict game scenes on their phone.

It’s that quality of the game that makes it most enthralling to Lee Beitzel, 24, of Youngstown.

“I was completely blown away by how intricate it is. It locks into your GPS, and it can tell in real time where you’re at. It uses your actual surroundings to play the game,” she said. Beitzel was playing the game as she walked to work downtown.

“It’s ridiculously addicting. I’ve lost my life to Pokemon,” she joked.

Also playing the game downtown this week were Tiffany Grooms of Niles and Chris Hodge of Champion.

Both expressed pleasant surprise at the game’s social quality.

“Everybody has been really friendly about it,” said Hodge.

Dylan Starr, 28, of Warren was on a work break and could not resist playing his friends downtown.

“I think it’s a good way to be active,” he said. “It does reward you for the physical activity.”

For Starr, and so many other players, the game brings them back to childhood.

“It brings people together,” he said.

Jessi Darrah, 36, of Youngstown was downtown Monday just to catch some Pokemon. The teacher played the video games when she was younger and had to jump on the playing bandwagon.

“I like how it’s like geocaching or a scavenger hunt,” she said.

As the game exploded in popularity across the country over the weekend, media reports on problems associated with the game also rapidly appeared.

Police in Missouri, for example, reported that armed robbers had used the game to lure victims by staking out gaming hotspots.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has had to forbid visitors from playing the game there.

Concerns also have arisen about data security and users’ privacy.

The CEO of a locally developed tech company, however, expressed only excitement about the Pokemon phenomenon.

“I think it’s fantastic. It’s really exciting to see something take on such a big cultural impact, and something that is transcending generations,” said Tony DeAscentis, CEO of Ving, a communications-platform company that is housed at the Youngstown Business Incubator downtown.

He noted the huge success of the game thus far, with reports indicating its active user base in the U.S. already had surpassed that of social media giant Twitter.

DeAscentis spoke by phone to a Vindicator reporter while at a global conference in Atlanta about mobile devices and how to use them to engage people.

“People are playing it here. People are playing it in New York. People are playing it in Youngstown. People are playing it everywhere,” he said. “It’s crazy – crazy fun.”

By July 8, two days after the app was launched, it was installed on more than 5 percent of Android devices in the U.S., according to similiarweb.com.

Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, estimates the app has at least 7.5 million U.S. downloads on iOS and Android phones since Thursday, Forbes reported Monday.

The game has sent Nintendo’s stocks soaring.

In Tokyo on Tuesday, Nintendo’s stock went up 13 percent, CNN Money reported. Nintendo shares, which also trade in the U.S., are up nearly 65 percent in just the past week.

Contributor: Kalea Hall, staff writer