McDonald´s Japan and Pokemon Company, meanwhile, officially announced a collaboration whereby the fast food chain´s outlets will be key locations – gyms and PokeStops – for Pokemon Go players.
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The game is already available in more than 30 major markets aside from Japan, but Nintendo’s home market is the first to feature advertising.
“Pokemon Go came, I can not bother with work”, a Twitter user posted minutes after it hit Google Play. Even the West Japan Railway Co.
The augmented-reality game, in which players walk around real-life neighborhoods to hunt and catch virtual cartoon characters that appear on their smartphone screens, has been blamed in the United States for several robberies of distracted mobile phone users and auto crashes. It has been a smash hit in countries including the U.S., Australia and elsewhere. An AP reporter was able to capture a Pokemon character on a colleague’s chair.
Ahead of the highly-anticipated launch, the Japanese government had launched a campaign promoting safe play of this smartphone game after multiple incidents of injury or trespassing by people playing the game have been reported in several countries.
Serkan Toto said fears of server outages may have caused the delay of the Pokemon Go’s release. She plays an unofficial version with an artificial map based on countries where the game is available.
“This game is just as I imagined it to be, it’s really fun”, said Toshinori Ishibashi, 18, who was seen playing the game near a Pokemon goods store in Tokyo Station.
Japan, however, had been made to wait, as Niantic, the developers behind the game, and Nintendo sought to ensure servers would withstand the game’s popularity.
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Sixteen-year-old high school student Mamiko Amaha was immersed in Pokemon Go with a group of girlfriends in Tokyo´s historic Asakusa district in search of Pokemon characters, as crowds of tourists strolled around. Chief executive John Hanke said in an interview that it would be technically possible to launch in China, but noted that a host of complex rules and restrictions would pose a big hurdle.
