Can you believe that the mobile AR game Pokémon GO is nine years old? We can’t; it only feels like yesterday we started taking our phones with us for ‘mon-catching trips.
The official GO X account shared some brand new artwork to celebrate the 9th anniversary, and it seems to include a couple of hints on what we can expect to see in the coming months.
The artwork, from Pokémon GO’s character designer Yusuke Kozaki, has a couple of small hints, but the big one is Paradox Pokémon, a new type of Pocket Monster introduced in Scarlet & Violet on Switch.
These are usually past or future-versions of Pokémon, and in the artwork you can see Great Tusk and Iron Treads, the Ancient and Future version of Donphan.
A more vague teaser in the artwork comes from the character with the thumbs-up icon in front of the Metagross; some think this could be hinting at remote trading, while others think its related to emotes. It could mean nothing, of course, but it’s more likely a little teaser.
Zygarde’s 50% form could be hinting at a new event based on the ‘mon — a logical conclusion given that Pokémon Legends: Z-A seems to be focusing on Order Pokémon, and that’s out this October. Gigantamax Butterfree also features, who is yet to appear in Pokémon GO. Our guess is we’ll hear more about this during the Pokémon Presents later this month.
The game has been making headlines throughout the year following Niantic Spatial’s decision to sell off its entire gaming division to publisher Scopely — which is part of Savvy Games Group and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — for $3.5 billion earlier this year.
Since then, the team behind the hugely popular AR game have stressed that the sale won’t impact the game and “intrusive ads” won’t be part of the experience. The devs have also doubled the amount of daily remote raids players can take part in, but that was reportedly in the works before the sale too.
Let us know if you’re looking forward to Paradox Pokémon in GO in the comments.
