Could Googles Pokémon Prank Show the Way for Struggling Nintendo?

POkemmonGoogle has partnered with Nintendo for its April Fools Day prank, a tie-in with the Japanese gaming companys Pokémon franchise on the Google Maps iOS and Android apps.

For the next day, when users search on Maps, they will be presented with a Press Start button styled after the classic Gameboy games. This then plants icons of Pokémon to be found around the maps, then caught and collected by the user.

Alex Spencer writes
For people like myself who grew up in the 1990s, this is a nice chunk of nostalgia. But, given the recent speculation around how Nintendo will respond to mobile, it could also be an interesting signpost for the companys future.

Nintendo has famously been very protective of its roster of intellectual properties, only producing games for its own hardware. Even though its a prank, Googles Pokémon Challenge is a great bit of branding, and actually lays out a reasonably plausible blueprint for how the companys franchises could be translated to mobile without simply porting across the games themselves.

The Challenge essentially adds a gamification layer to activities the user will be performing on their mobile anyway – and its worth noting that Pokémon has always been a primarily portable game with a thematic focus on travel, meaning Google Maps is a perfect fit. On top of that, Google posted a fake video (see below) showing how users could play an Augmented Reality version of Pokémon on their smartphones which looks more appetising than any of the more recent official games.

If Nintendo doesnt want to risk cannibalising the audience on its consoles, it could worse than building on the foundations that have been laid out today by one of the companies that, with the tremendous success of Android games over the past few years, has been contributing to its demise. Its unlikely this will ever come to pass. But given that irony, it did, wouldnt that prove to be the greatest April Fools joke of all?