Way back in the autumn of 2004, I may have invented the world's first GPS-based augmented reality game. In light of the stratospheric success of Pokémon Go, I'm wondering whether I should have perhaps attempted to patent my invention.

My game was called Augmented Reality Multi-User Dungeon, or ARMUD for short, and it was the topic of my university thesis. The idea seemed quite simple to me: I started with a text-based MUD, and then layered a real-world positional element on top of it. As you walked around the university campus you would move through the MUD's zones. In the real world you might be standing in the student union bar; in the game, reading the zone's description on your mobile device, you were actually inside an uproarious tavern full of stereotypically angry dwarves, behooded humans, and trixy hobbits.

If you bumped into another player, you could trade or fight or talk, or send in-game whispers if you didn't want to talk to the person in real life.

I even hatched a plan to rapidly expand the number of augmented zones: instead of mapping and writing descriptions for the entire university campus myself, I would crowdsource (a term that didn't exist back then) it. If someone wrote the augmented description for the laundry room, for example, they would then become the "lord" of that zone, which would grant some perks, such as bonus XP if people stayed and interacted with your zone.

ARMUD was, if you'll forgive a brief moment of distinctly un-British self-aggrandisement, pretty damn awesome.

Construct additional pylons

But, alas, my genius thesis was stillborn. I was several years ahead of the technological curve.

At the time, I had an HP iPaq PDA running Windows Mobile, which was pretty much the bleeding edge of mobile technology. The PDA, which cost about £600, had 802.11b Wi-Fi, which was starting to become popular in 2004. It also had a decent CPU. But it didn't have GPS or cellular connectivity. You could add those features via "jackets," at great expense: I think the GSM/GPRS jacket was about £300.

Without GPS being readily available—something that wouldn't happen until smartphones became popular half a decade later—I experimented with the idea of using triangulated Wi-Fi for positioning. It worked well enough to pin someone's location down to a large area—like, one of the large squares in the middle of campus—but there simply weren't enough Wi-Fi networks back then to produce a location fix with decent resolution. I toyed with installing more Wi-Fi hubs across campus, but given that they still cost about £100 a piece back then, that seemed a little extreme.

Eventually I gave up: I just couldn't find a way to cheaply and easily work out a player's physical location. Plus, there was the small fact that only two or three students on campus actually had a PDA capable of playing the game, if I had invested in the infrastructure.

Instead I shifted the focus of my project to natural language processing—the ability to type your MUD commands in plain English, and have the game understand you.

Reflecting on my missing millions

In the summer of 2005 I submitted my thesis, wrapped up some exams, and graduated. Years passed. My thesis sat on a shelf, gathering dust, until I eventually moved house and put it in a cardboard box. Then, beginning in 2007, I started to see some location-based apps emerge. At first they used Wi-Fi triangulation: in Plundr, for example, you played a pirate that moved between Wi-Fi hotspot "islands," trading and fighting along the way.

Then, in 2008, smartphone GPS started to become a thing with the release and massive popularity of the iPhone 3GS. When Foursquare was launched in 2009, with people automatically checking into real-world locations via GPS, I really started to think about whether I should've developed ARMUD further. And then, of course, when Ingress—Pokémon Go's predecessor—was released in 2013, everything had fully slotted into place.

I probably should've at least looked into patenting some of the ideas from ARMUD, but I knew very little about intellectual property law at the time—except that software patents were not something that I fully supported. Now that 12 years have passed, is it too late for me to patent my ARG tech? Should I attempt to patent it? These are the questions that keep me up at night, friends.