“There’s a really rare Pokémon really close by,” confides Deann Rossi.



She’s leaning against a wall near the World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan, surveying the landscape on her Pokémon Go app.

The rare species is a Scyther, a nearly 5ft-tall green bug, known for its aggression and speed. It’s just a few blocks away, loitering on a street corner towards the Hudson River.

Sadly for the busy Rossi, 31, she can’t catch the 123lb insectoid – this Scyther will live to fight another day.

Rossi has been a fan of the Pokémon world, where humans catch creatures and pit them against each other for sport, since the 1990s. But since Pokémon Go, a mobile version of the game, was released, her interest has risen to new levels. In the five days since its 6 July launch, Rossi has already spent many hours playing the game.

A woman tries to catch ’em all. Photograph: Piroschka van de Wouw/EPA

“I don’t even want to think about it,” she says of the time she has spent hunting down Pokémon including Pikachu, Charizard and Jigglypuff. “I’m supposed to be in my office right now and I thought: ‘I’m going to look while I’m on my way to get coffee.’”

Rossi’s commitment has paid dividends, however. Using her iPhone, she has already captured 60 Pokémon. She has also made friends along the way.

“I was in the middle of my home town,” Rossi says, referring to Belport, a city with a population of 2,000 in Long Island, New York.

“And I put out a lure [a device a gamer can plant to attract unwitting Pokémon to your location] and then a bunch of 16-year-old boys just roll up on their skateboards, going: ‘Who put that out? Who’s playing?’”

Rossi says the release of Pokémon Go, which has already been downloaded around 7.5m times in the US, has been cathartic during an ill-tempered election and a period of widespread civil unrest.

“This is full-on escapism,” she says. “Where I’m like: ‘Let me just go catch some Pokemon and ignore the news.’”

On the hunt in Union Square, New York. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

From New York City’s financial district to the waterfront in San Francisco, the city where the new incarnation of the game was born, it’s not hard to find other people playing Pokémon Go.

On the next block from where Rossi is playing, Joanna Zhang is in the process of detaining a Pidgey, a foot-tall bird that is apparently capable of delivering “big pecks”.

Zhang, 22, grew up in China, where she used to collect Pokémon stickers. She now lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, and has a haul of 20 Pokemon. She says she has been walking an hour a day trying to catch more.

While there seem to be many areas in New York City where Pokémon are rife, the popularity of Pokemon Go is not confined to large cities.

Dariush Shafa, a 32-year-old marketing specialist, lives in Owensboro, Kentucky. It has a population of 59,000 people, and it seems a good many of them spent Sunday night walking around the city’s Smothers Park, trying to catch Pokémon.

“I would say there were several hundred people, and easily 90-95% were playing the game,” says Shafa. He could tell who was playing through a combination of snooping at their phone screens and watching them waft their devices around in the air.

Like Rossi, Shafa has been playing the game since its release. He has caught 200 Pokémon, although in a show of benevolence, he has released more than 130 back into the wild.

Shafa wears a pedometer and says he walked 12,000 steps on Sunday in his quest to add more Pokémon to his roster – far more than his usual 3,000.

“I’ve got a day job. I’ve got concerns about politics, and the overall status of my community, and of my country, and of the world,” he says.

“But at the same time, if you sit and get overwhelmed by that, that’s no fun. So it’s nice to have something that is enjoyable, that gets you outside, gets you a little bit of sunshine and some physical activity.”

The park has proved to be a happy hunting ground for Shafa, who wasn’t even interested in Pokemon until the app was released. He played games like Final Fantasy and Zelda growing up – never Pokémon.

“The obsession is new,” he says.

Even so, he has managed to do what Rossi failed to do on Monday morning.



Medical students hunt for Pokémon in New York. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“I captured a Scyther,” Shafa says. “The guy next to me looked at me and said: ‘You’re so lucky, because a) that’s a very high-powered Pokémon, but also, it’s hard to get.’

On Monday afternoon, Alain Pierre, a 29-year-old San Francisco resident, stands in Rincon Park at the waterfront along the city’s Embarcadero, clutching his iPhone as his friends surround him. He works as a salesman at a local gym two blocks away from Niantic Labs, the company that collaborated with Nintendo to create the smartphone game.

“Everyone is playing in San Francisco,” says Pierre as he embarks on an aggressive Pokémon Go “battle” at a so-called “gym” – across the street from the real-life gym where he works.

“It’s everywhere ... and it’s adults playing,” says Pierre, estimating that he’s met a hundred people playing in San Francisco since last week.

Pierre says that while playing Pokémon Go he has also walked straight into at least three poles, nearly crashed his car, exchanged phone numbers with strangers, and lost 3lbs from all the Pokémon-related exercise.

“My girlfriend and I go on Pokémon date nights now,” adds Christine Stokes, a trainer at the gym where Pierre works.

A Pidgey is spotted. Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters

A few feet away, Tristan Cherry Sr, 49, and his 19-year-old son Tristan Cherry Jr say they travelled 90 miles from their hometown of Patterson to play Pokémon together in San Francisco.

“You can tell there’s a whole lot of people playing here,” says the younger Cherry, briefly looking up from his smartphone to say he’s been playing for hours on end every night since he downloaded it.

His dad, an electrician, adds: “If you want to lose weight, play some Pokémon.”

The son concurs: “I’ve walked a lot more than I have in a long time.”

Christie Pham, a 27-year-old who works at a San Francisco startup company, says the game has encouraged her to appreciate buildings and landmarks in her city.

But she’s also seen people stopping in the middle of traffic to play the game.

“It’s fun, but people shouldn’t be getting in car accidents and risking their lives to play.”