For Anna Krolikowski, a New Canaan High School class of 1987 graduate, it seemed for a moment as though the town had been cast back to a simpler, less technological era.
The app appeared temporarily to crash its servers on Tuesday afternoon.
Driving to Bankwell on Elm Street on Monday, Krolikowski (née Valente) spotted four kids lying belly-down, on the grass outside.
“I thought, ‘Oh look, how nice, they’re just chilling out. Kids being normal kids again,’ ” said Krolikowski, owner of Baskin Robbins on Main Street. “But they’re all on their phones. I thought they were playing a game against each other. Then I go to Town Hall and I see a bunch of kids all sitting on the grass. I thought, ‘Why are all these kids all over town?’ ”
Born from the original Pokemon launched by Japan’s Nintendo in the late-1990s, the game at its most basic level involves capturing all types of fantastical creatures (here’s a good primer) called ‘Pokemon.’ Restricted for years to the gaming world, Pokemon Go uses location-based services to plant the virtual creatures in the “real world” by overlaying them on a map based on a smartphone user’s location.
Klaus Luther and Melissa Purdy work at Starbucks in New Canaan. They’re both veterans of Pokemon the original game, and are enjoying the new Pokemon Go app. Credit: Michael Dinan
Thus New Canaan, and the rest of the world, now is chock full of not just millennial smartphone users but older folks who remember Pokemon, milling about their towns, Android or iPhone in hand, searching for the creatures down familiar roads and sidewalks.
In New Canaan, Pokemon have been “found” near New Canaan Veterinary Hospital on Vitti Street (consider that, P&Z), as well as the Playhouse on Elm Street and Mead Park.
For Starbucks workers Klaus Luther of Darien and Melissa Purdy of Norwalk, it’s a new way to experience a major part of their youth and life.
Purdy, 24, said she downloaded the new app when it came out five days earlier and plays “all day when I can, when I’m not working or sleeping.”
“I have loved Pokemon since when it first came out when I was five or six, when the TV show came out and first game came out,” she said. “I’ve been playing it my whole life.”
Rising NCHS freshmen Charlie Sihpol and Ty Hoey are playing Pokemon Go with the rest of the world. Credit: Michael Dinan
Asked to explain to the unfamiliar what the wider Pokemon phenomenon is about, Purdy said: “It’s cute little monsters that you get to travel around the Pokemon world with, catch more. You are spending your whole Pokemon life with these Pokemon.”
With Luther, she traveled to New York City yesterday and “captured” Pokemon there, along with about 200 other people who ended up in the same area of Union Square.
Luther, 23, said he is drawn to the new app by his nostalgia for Pokemon as an elementary school-aged kid at Hindley School in Darien.
He downloaded the app two days ago.
“I just I saw Pokemon go and all my friends getting into it and it’s like right back to fourth or fifth grade, like reliving being a kid again, running around catching Pokemon,” he said. “Everyone I know is playing it.”
That ‘everyone’ includes people of all ages, though middle-aged and older folks who are trying out the game have earned the Twitter tag #PokeMongo.
Rising NCHS freshmen Charlie Sihpol and Ty Hoey both were using the app while strolling down Elm Street on Tuesday.
Sihpol got Pokemon Go a few days ago and, asked to explain just what it is that makes it so addictive, he said: “I’m not sure. I think it’s just the part that it’s in real life and you can walk around and find all the animals in real places. I found some just down there by Dunkin Donuts and then by the movie theater.”
Hoey downloaded the app just 10 minutes earlier and his first impression was that “it seems pretty fun.”
“It looks like it could last awhile,” he said.
We’ll see.