Niantic, the company behind the Augmented Reality phenomenon, Pokemon GO, has announced that it plans to host 48 real-world events that will take place in 2018 and 2019 for Ingress – the game that has a dedicated user-base, but has remained relatively niche, unlike its more popular stablemate. While Pokemon GO has amassed over 700 million downloads on iOS and Android combined since its launch in 2016, Ingress has managed only around 14 million over roughly the same period.
Ingress was released back in 2012 when Niantic was still operating as a Google subsidiary, and in the intervening years, Niantic has hosted over 2,000 real world events around the world. The upcoming events are going to be held at various locations spread around the US, Canada, Western Europe and Asia, but the only Indian city on the list seems to be Pune – and that’s only in February 2019 – so all of you Ingress players in Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and elsewhere are out of luck.
Here’s the full list of cities (in chronological order):
- Fukuoka, Japan – April 7, 2018
- Camp Navarro, CA, USA – May 25-28, 2018
- Schloss Kaltenberg, Germany – May 25-28, 2018
- San Diego, CA, USA – July 28, 2018
- Sapporo, Japan – July 28, 2018
- Warsaw, Poland – July 28, 2018
- Boston, MA, USA – July 28, 2018
- Malé, Maldives – July 28, 2018
- Marseille, France – July 28, 2018
- Philadelphia, PA – August 25, 2018
- Singapore – August 25, 2018
- Linz, Austria – August 25, 2018
- Vancouver, British Columbia – August 25, 2018
- Incheon, South Korea – August 25, 2018
- Riga, Latvia – August 25, 2018
- Phoenix, AZ, USA – October 20, 2018
- Taichung, Taiwan – October 20, 2018
- Brno, Czech – October 20, 2018
- Mexico City, Mexico – October 20, 2018
- Minneapolis, MN, USA – October 20, 2018
- Canberra, Australia – October 20, 2018
- Palma de Mallorca, Spain – October 20, 2018
- Bangkok, Thailand – October 20, 2018
- Frankfurt, Germany – October 20, 2018
- Austin, TX, USA – November 17, 2018
- Hong Kong – November 17, 2018
- Barcelona, Spain – November 17, 2018
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA – November 17, 2018
- Yogyakarta, Indonesia – November 17, 2018
- Bucharest, Romania – November 17, 2018
- Asuncion, Paraguay – February 23, 2019
- Quezon City, Philippines – February 23, 2019
- Lisbon, Portugal – February 23, 2019
- New Orleans, LA, USA – February 23, 2019
- Albuquerque, NM, USA – February 23, 2019
- Auckland, New Zealand – February 23, 2019
- Athens, Greece – February 23, 2019
- Pune, India – February 23, 2019
- Genoa, Italy – February 23, 2019
- Atlanta, GA, USA – March 23, 2019
- Ho Chi Minch City, Vietnam – March 23, 2019
- Nuremberg, Germany – March 23, 2019
- Las Vegas, NV, USA – March 23, 2019
- Nagoya Japan – March 23, 2019
- Bristol, UK – March 23, 2019
- Kaohsiung, Taiwan – May 4, 2019
- Amsterdam, NL – May 11, 2019
- Chicago, IL, USA – May 18, 2019
There will be different types of events, according to the company. The Ingress XM Anomaly events which are free, Operation Clear Field which are tailored towards the environmentally conscious, the Ingress Mission Days that take players on special exploration activities and GORUCK events that integrate Ingress gameplay with mental and physical team challenges.
Agents, thanks to your hard work our research is complete. We’ve discovered numerous Anomaly-like XM events. Further, the document we discovered yesterday has itself shed light on a near-term XM aberration. (see: https://t.co/u5O9p4zge8) #anomalyintel [1/2] pic.twitter.com/Ox4rbvrx1t
— Ingress (@ingress) February 14, 2018
It’s worth noting here that in what would be the game’s first major redesign in a long while, Niantic announced a massive update to Ingress late last year.
The new version is called ‘Ingress Prime’, and is expected to come with upgraded visuals, thanks to the use of Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit that should bring the best possible augmented-reality experience to players.
