As part of its ongoing 20th anniversary celebration, The Pokémon Company just gave thousands of people with too much time on their hands the opportunity to create officially branded mischief on their smartphones.


The 20th anniversary celebration kicks into high gear this weekend. Nintendo has an incredibly short Pokémon Nintendo Direct on Friday. On Saturday there’s a special event at 3 PM at the Nintendo World Store on Saturday. GameStop will be giving out posters with Pokémon purchases, and Toys’R’Us will be giving out foil cards for the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

And all through the week folks will be making images like these, thanks to the Pokémon Photo Booth app.


I’ve a feeling I’ll be pulling this app out at regular intervals until the end of time.

The app allows folks to snap pictures (or add preexisting shots), apply a variety of filters and create either a captioned shot, like the one above, or a profile pic image with a ghostly Pokéball hovering over it. The Pokémon Company hopes that will look something like this:


Bit I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more like this:


It’ll probably get much worse, but I don’t want to think about that. Happy thoughts.

The Pokémon Photo Booth app is now available for free download on iOS, with an Android version coming later, just to make Android users sad.

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