“By the time we got to him, I think level eight was the highest you could reach on Ingress – and he and his wife had both maxed it out. It was just the perfect template for an AR game.” He flew to Tokyo to pitch it to Tsunekazu Ishihara, chief executive of the Pokémon Company. “The whole fantasy of Pokémon blends perfectly with the real world, right? You’re a Pokémon trainer, out in the world, finding Pokémon. Ingress’s spy story about hidden portals in real-world cities was a cult hit, and led directly to Pokémon Go. if I hold up my phone – my scanner, in the parlance of Ingress – it’s telling me about this hidden world.” “That then morphed into our first game, Ingress,” Hanke explains, “We wanted a game where you are seeing the world as you see it, but your mind would be able to add that extra layer of mystery. Niantic’s first step toward this goal was an educational app, Field Trip, which saw players walking around their cities and learning about various landmarks.
We thought that if our games do that, then people will be better off than they were before.” “When we started Niantic, we had the idea of people exploring the world – exercising and engaging with other people.
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Longing to return to play, Hanke branched off a new software company, Niantic, to realise his dream of turning Earth into the ultimate game map. “Various famous game developers” – he won’t say who – “came to us and said, “I’ve been making this open world type of game, I’d like to make it really open world.” Though the conversations piqued his interest, “we could never quite figure out the right way to work with those companies from inside of Google”. Making a digital globe that felt like a video game – but that let you explore the world through maps – was a neat way to combine all the things I was interested in.”Īs fun as working on Maps was, over his decade at Google, Hanke’s passion for game development never really left him. “They built our own fleet of aircraft to fly and capture our overhead imagery, then the Street View programme, of course, that led us ultimately to collect our own map data. “Google was very generous with their funding,” says Hanke. ‘Think about the games that you play: how many of them start by unfolding a game board – some kind of map?’ … Niantic CEO John Hanke.
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Thanks to his experience cramming vast fictional worlds on to compact discs, Keyhole figured out how to compress and easily transmit vast swathes of 3D digital imagery, using its custom tech to build a huge amount of cartographic data and send it across the internet at rapid speed. “There was a need to make flight simulation that would accurately simulate the real world, so pilots can train and the visual cues that they be similar to what they would see in real life,” explains Hanke. After Berkeley, he co-founded Keyhole, an organisation set up to make truly accurate flight simulators for the military, which secured funding from Sony, NVIDIA and the CIA. Impressed, Game publisher 3DO bought the rights to the MMO the day Hanke graduated.Ĭreating Meridian 59 would be a life-defining achievement for most, but Hanke’s tech journey was just getting started.
As part of a studio called Archetype Interactive, Hanke and his friends created one of the first massively multiplayer online games to market – a genre later famously popularised by Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. Building and making stuff was something that bit me young.” In between attending business lectures at Berkeley, he began charting a more fantastical landscape than Earth: the magic-filled world of Meridian 59, his first video game project. Growing up reading National Geographic, Hanke became fascinated with the idea of mapping our planet, as well as the mind-boggling possibilities of computing: “I was born in the home computer era.
Photograph: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images A Google Street View car and an oversized Google Maps pin at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
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