Pokemon Craze Sparks Search for Pirate Maps, Crashed Alien Craft
- Mapbox provides maps for Foursquare, Evernote and Pinterest
- The company is readying map design tools for game developers
The Pidgey character of Nintendo Co.'s Pokemon Go augmented-reality game, developed by Niantic Inc., is seen in front of the Hong Kong skyline on a smartphone in an arranged photograph in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, July 25, 2016.
Photographer: Anthony Kwan/BloombergMapbox Inc., the provider of maps for customers including Evernote and the Washington Post, felt Pokemon Go’s impact the very day the monster-hunting game launched in the U.S. last month.
Inquiries from game developers poured in even though Mapbox wasn’t behind the smash hit. One asked for a dark theme for night-time fighting, another for a pirate map with locations marked in old-school cursive script, Chief Executive Officer Eric Gundersen said in an interview. A publisher wanted to know all the city parks large enough to house a crashed alien spaceship.