One of the biggest gaming phenomenons in recent memory was released exactly a year ago. Pokémon Go will celebrate the occasion with Pikachu, of course.
Today Niantic announced a new event that will run from July 6th to July 24th. In it, players will be able to acquire a special Pikachu wearing Ash’s hat, along with some other goodies:
You’ll also be able to stock up for Raid Battles and the events ahead with the special limited-time Anniversary Box, which will include Incubators, Max Revives, Ultra Balls, and Raid Passes at a discount in the in-game shop.
For some, these additions may seem paltry, especially given that we still haven’t gotten features like trading or legendary monsters. In an interview with The Verge, Niantic CEO John Hanke said that the explosive popularity of the game has affected its development:
We lost probably six months on our schedule because of the success of the game. Really all the way through November and December, from launch onward we were rebuilding and rewiring infrastructure just to keep the game running at the scale that we were running at. We were fortunate to have a massive launch, a massive success, and many, many more users than we had planned for. But we had to redirect a substantial portion of the engineering team to [work on] infrastructure versus new features. That switched off things like extending gyms, it pushed out things we still want to have, like player-versus-player and trading. I’d say we’re about six months behind where we thought we would be.
For now, let’s just enjoy the Pikachu.