Best Weekend Ever? Playing Pokemon Go With 717,000 Fans of the Game

Over the course of three days, Jacob Crowe walked 26 miles across Chicago in super-humid heat and rainy mornings, engaging in hundreds of virtual battles. Alongside tens of thousands of other players, he sought the rarest Pokemon, particularly Shiny variants.

“It makes it better to do it as a group together,” Crowe said of the crowds that gathered to play the mobile game as part of Pokemon Go Fest.

I was there, too, among those thousands, draining my phone battery out in the sun while catching hundreds of virtual creatures in Grant Park and other parts of the city.

During that mass gathering in early June, the game I’d been playing alone for the past year suddenly felt like a gigantic concert packed with fans as obsessed as I am. Or even more so. 

I hadn’t expected that. True, when Pokemon Go launched in 2016, it was a mobile gaming sensation. Phones in hand, players descended on parks and other public spaces to catch all those pocket monsters, in the form of augmented reality animations. For a while, it felt like everybody was playing Pokemon Go.

But then, as crazes do, Pokemon fever cooled down. People moved on. I stopped playing the game regularly not long after it debuted. 

Turns out the enthusiasm has been simmering all along, and it just takes something like Go Fest to bring things to a boil.

The event had been expected to attract 40,000 people per day. But according to the enthusiast site GoNintendo, more than twice that many (90,000) tickets were sold for the Grant Park event (players entered and left at staggered times), and over 717,000 players in Chicago were recorded catching nearly 62 million Pokemon during citywide play. Six couples got engaged at the event, proving that Pokemon Go may be a stealth dating app.   

Pokemon Go Fest 2026 was special because it marked the 10th anniversary of the game and the ninth anniversary of the first Go Fest, which also took place in Chicago. And it coincided with a Pokemon Fossil Museum exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum, which provides a spectacularly detailed history of Pokemon evolution, complete with gigantic skeletons, remains trapped in amber and a very robust gift shop.

The weekend also included a US Men’s National Soccer Team match and a half-marathon. So many fans attended the various events that gameplay was suspended in some areas, including at the Field Museum.

Welcome back to Pokemon Go

Last year, I picked the game back up with some family members. Those of us who’d abandoned it came back with fierce devotion.

So much had been added to the game since I last played it — from trading with other players (even remotely) to user-generated routes to large-scale raids that sometimes require more than a dozen players. 

At first, the changes were overwhelming, but the experienced group I joined gave helpful advice. At the same time, online videos, Wiki pages and some Google searching provided answers to the obstacles I encountered.

The game became a daily habit for our group. We exchanged gifts, traded lucky Pokemon and did lots and lots of walking. Pokemon Go Fest provided a great excuse to meet up, eat lots of local food, and play a game together we’d all been enjoying separately.

We bought one-day passes for the Grant Park 10th anniversary event and secured tickets to the Fossil Museum exhibit. Upon arrival in Chicago, we saw Pokemon fans everywhere, some wearing Eevee hats or Gengar shirts, toting Pikachu backpacks or doing full-blown cosplay.

Age didn’t seem to matter. Boomers, Gen Z players, little kids, they all had their phones out, spinning PokéStops and waiting to capture some rare mega Pokemon characters.

Playing Pokemon Go with friends and strangers

When Niantic created Pokemon Go, it emphasized the game’s real-world aspects. Niantic’s founder, John Hanke, who also helped create Google Maps and Google Earth, told me last year when I covered its sale (Pokemon Go and other Niantic games were acquired by Scopely) that the game focused on encouraging players to venture outside and explore.

Even playing Pokemon Go outside, however, can be isolating. You’re looking at your phone and dealing with virtual characters or remote players, not interacting with the people around you.

That wasn’t the case at Go Fest. 

With tens of thousands of locals and travelers all around us, we were suddenly in a very large club. Strangers who saw us playing at the coffee shop asked what we’d caught so far. Passersby yelled, “Great outfit!” to my sister-in-law, Linh Gallaga, for her Sylveon cosplay. Some pointed and smiled at the Excavator Pikachu keychain plushies we picked up at the Field Museum and wore out in public.  

Within our small group, meanwhile, we traded Pokemon, bought virtual supplies, strategized to maximize our game objectives and shared news updates. I spent about $30 on microtransactions, like premium raid passes and extra storage to hold more items and more captured Pokemon. Some in my group spent hundreds of dollars in preparation for Go Fest.

In search of Mega Pokemon characters

Our group had two leaders: One was Linh, who kept us in the loop about social media posts. The other was Jacob Crowe, who toted up those 26 miles of walking that weekend (and who’s also an in-law of mine, a little more removed). He’s so dedicated to the game that he participated in 225 group raid battles to capture Mewtwo, one of the major Mega Pokemon characters at Go Fest.

The goal wasn’t just to catch Mewtwo, but to capture its rare variations, such as a perfect-stat one, called a Hundo. Capture one that’s both a Hundo and also a Shiny variant, and you’ve got yourself a coveted Shundo Mewtwo — and a lot of jealous fellow players. A version of Mewtwo featuring a Chicago backdrop was also highly sought after.

Crowe and his wife, Maria, drove from Indianapolis, where they’d participated in local Pokemon raid events, but nothing like this.

“I knew it would be a lot of people, but I didn’t know it would be that many people,” he told me. 

He spent 18 hours each day playing Pokemon Go. He says he had a great time and wants to do it again. 

It was Crowe who led our group to a 5 a.m. “Raid Train” at Lincoln Park, ahead of the official Go Fest event at Grant Park we’d be participating in later. As soft rain started falling, we wandered the park, capturing all the Pokemon that we could and watching players trade and join raid battles. This wasn’t the main event. It was a social gathering and a preview of the big show to come later that day.

“Hundo! I got a Hundo!”

I wasn’t expecting to experience cognitive dissonance when I arrived at Grant Park with my group, but it happened as soon as I saw a gigantic pink inflatable Jigglypuff near the large park fountain. In the game, I think of Jigglypuff as tiny; here, the Pokemon was easily 10 feet tall.

Throughout the park, team banners, lures and spinning Pokestops were blown up to huge proportions, dotting a vast expanse with colorful landmarks.

We snapped photos and started preparing our virtual supplies. A cloudy morning quickly gave way to a hot day. Once gameplay began, we saw people walking around with tiny umbrellas attached to their phones, both to reduce glare on their screens and to keep their devices from overheating in the sun.

Challenges required moving from zone to zone and completing tasks such as capturing 20 different kinds of Pokemon in a single area. Raid battles to catch bigger, stronger Pokemon were constant.

Pokemon theme music blasted across the park. People walked, swiping their screens to toss Poké Balls as they went. One half of a couple near us shouted, “Hundo! I got a Hundo!” and the two embraced as if they’d just found out they were having a baby.

We walked and walked and caught and caught until the finale: a big group battle with hundreds of players together trying to defeat Mega versions of Mewtwo. 

Everyone fighting did so as part of a “Unity Raid.” Part of the battle required players to raise their phones up into the air and then bring them swinging down. 

When the mega raid was over, the crowd let out a loud, “Wooooo!” It was over. We were each left to attempt to capture the prize with our allotted premiere Pokeballs. We all caught our Mewtwos.

Pokemon at the museum

We kept raiding and trading over the evening and the next day, but our next big event was a visit to the Fossil Museum.

Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History is a real museum, with exhibits of actual fossils, but for the event, curators set up fossil exhibits of the various Pokemon characters. And they took their job seriously.

Far from a simple one-room pop-up, the carefully arranged exhibit features detailed descriptions and full skeletons of Pokemon characters, plus other artifacts like fossilized (fake) poop and Pokemon insects trapped in amber.

I felt bad for the parents of little kids who had to straddle the line between telling them that this exhibit isn’t real and letting those kids enjoy an incredibly imaginative presentation.

The exhibit was followed by a robust gift shop featuring only Pokemon merchandise and open exclusively to attendees. There was a five-item limit, and the hot item, limited to one per purchase, was an Excavator Pikachu plush. 

The exhibit runs through April 2027.

Pokemon Go Fest players: “They’re all so friendly”

By the end of the weekend, we were all exhausted. We were mentally and physically drained, like our phone batteries, from staring at our screens and keeping track of all our Shiny acquisitions.

We were amateurs, though. David Barnwell, an attendee who owns a dog-boarding business near Akron, Ohio, has been to Go Fest events with his wife in cities including Seattle, Miami and New York. He’s always been a collector, and says Pokemon Go’s focus on acquisition appeals to him. And he loves meeting different people who are into the game.

“We’re always amazed at the different kinds of people that you would never expect to be playing Pokemon Go that show up, and they’re all so friendly,” Barnwell said. 

But he also feels things have changed since last year’s Pokemon Go acquisition.

For one thing, Barnwell said, there aren’t any never-before-seen Pokemon released during the event anymore. And the event is more spread out, with citywide challenges that make it less centralized. 

“That’s really annoying. We liked it when it was all accessible by foot,” he said. “I appreciate you’re trying to get different people in different parts of the city or whatever it is you’re thinking you’re trying to do, but we don’t like that at all.”

His family’s attendance at future Go events will depend on whether the host city is one they want to visit. Tokyo, a return to Seattle and an event near the Grand Canyon are on their wish list.

As for our group, we’re already talking about hitting Go Fest next year, but it will also depend on everybody’s schedules and where the US event lands next. For the time being, we plan to keep playing and tending to our growing Pokemon collections.