Everyday Encounters: A Pokémon Go player aims to catch ’em all in Tiburon

Fremont resident Denny Cao, a software engineer with Tiburon-based Digital Foundry, spent his July 8 lunch break walking around downtown Tiburon playing Pokémon Go, the mobile game that became a cultural phenomenon upon its release July 6, 2016. (Francisco Martinez / The Ark)

Denny Cao is tapping his phone screen on a lunch break from his job as a software engineer at Tiburon’s Digital Foundry.

But he’s not checking email or texting. The 29-year-old Fremont resident is trying to defeat an animated monster near the Edward Zelinsky ferry landing in downtown Tiburon.

Cao and two colleagues were playing Pokémon Go downtown on July 8. The augmented-reality game for iPhone and Android devices sends players to real-world landmarks to catch, train and battle the “pocket monsters,” the formal name for the media franchise now featuring 1,028 creatures — and counting. The franchise began with 151 monsters when the original games were released in February 1996 in Japan on the Nintendo Game Boy.

“It just gets you outdoors,” Cao says of the game, which he has played on and off since before its official release in July 2016, when he was a beta tester. He says he was especially grateful for the game during the stay-at-home orders in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

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