20 Game Anniversaries Coming In 2026 That'll Age You Mercilessly

After years of tinkering around the edges, Pokémon GO was the first major and widespread step in augmented reality gaming, offering players across the globe the opportunity not just to catch their favourite Pokémon on a screen, but to actually journey out into the world and find them.

Pokémon GO uses the GPS and camera on your phone to find, catch, train and fight Pokémon in your real environment, with the initial 150 species being scaled up to match player interest. And it’s as simple as that: real life becoming the world of Pokémon, providing avenues of exploration as large as the globe itself.

Fewer things feel fresher and more of the moment than this kind of cutting-edge technological integration, and yet we’re now ten years deep into GO. That’s right: the game premiered in 2016. During this briefest of decades, players have wandered into demilitarised zones, created innumerable public nuisances, and wound up in improbable, life-threatening situations – all to catch their next Weedle. Despite this, the game is still going strong, getting new updates and features year on year that have a lot to do with why it still seems current.