Jul 22, 2016
The idea for the game was conceived in 2013 by Satoru Iwata of Nintendo and Tsunekazu Ishihara of The Pokémon Company as an April Fools' Day collaboration with Google called Pokémon Challenge, with Tatsuo Nomura of Google Maps, who then became a senior project manager at Niantic, at the center of the project. In 2015, Ishihara dedicated his speech at the game's announcement on September 10 to Iwata, who had died two months earlier. The decision to create the Go Plus rather than create a smart watch app was to increase uptake among players for whom a smart watch is prohibitively expensive. Via http://imgur.com/t/pokemon_go/kvNrMik