Over the course of three days, Jacob Crowe walked 26 miles across Chicago in super-humid heat and rainy mornings, engaging in hundreds of virtual battles. He sought the rarest of Pokémon — Shiny variants in particular — alongside tens of thousands of other players.
“It makes it better to do it as a group together,” Crowe said of the crowds that gathered to play the mobile game as part of Pokémon Go Fest.
And I was there too, among those thousands, draining my phone battery out in the sun while catching hundreds of virtual creatures in Grant Park and other parts of the city.
During that mass gathering in early June, the game I’d been playing alone for the past year suddenly felt like a gigantic concert packed with fans as obsessed as I am. Or even moreso.
I hadn’t expected that. True, when Pokémon Go launched in 2016, it was a mobile gaming sensation. Phones in hand, players descended on parks and other public spaces to catch all those pocket monsters, in the form of augmented reality animations. For a while, it felt like everybody was playing Pokémon Go.
But then, as crazes do, Pokémon fever cooled down. People moved on. I stopped playing the game regularly not long after it debuted.
Turns out the enthusiasm has been simmering all along, and it just takes something like Go Fest to bring things to a boil.
The event had been expected to attract 40,000 people per day. But according to the enthusiast site GoNintendo, more than twice that many (90,000) tickets were sold for the Grant Park event (players entered and left at staggered times), and over 717,000 players in Chicago were recorded catching nearly 62 million Pokémon during citywide play. Six couples got engaged at the event, proving that Pokémon Go may be a stealth dating app.
Pokémon Go Fest 2026 was special because it marked the 10th anniversary of the game and the ninth anniversary of the first Go Fest, which also took place in Chicago. And it coincided with a Pokémon Fossil Museum exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum, which provides a spectacularly detailed (and, of course, made-up) history of Pokémon evolution, complete with gigantic skeletons, remains trapped in amber and a very robust gift shop.
The weekend also included a US Men’s National Soccer Team match and a half-marathon. So many fans attended the various events that gameplay was suspended in some areas, including at the Field Museum.
Returning to Pokémon Go
Last year, I picked the game back up with some family members. Those of us who’d abandoned it came back with fierce devotion.
So much had been added to the game since I last played it — from trading with other players (even remotely) to user-generated routes to large-scale raids that sometimes require more than a dozen players.
Players gather in Chicago’s Grant Park as part of the 2026 Pokémon Go Fest event.
26 miles of walking
Our group had two leaders: One was Linh, who kept us in the loop about social media posts. The other was Jacob Crowe, who toted up those 26 miles of walking that weekend (and who’s also an in-law of mine, a little more removed). He’s so dedicated to the game that he participated in 225 group raid battles to capture Mewtwo, one of the major Mega Pokémon characters at Go Fest.
The goal wasn’t just to catch Mewtwo, but to capture its rare variations, such as a perfect-stat one, called a Hundo. Capture one that’s both a Hundo and also a Shiny variant, and you’ve got yourself a coveted Shundo Mewtwo — and a lot of jealous fellow players. A version of Mewtwo featuring a Chicago backdrop was also highly sought after.
Crowe and his wife, Maria, drove from Indianapolis, where they’d participated in local Pokémon raid events, but nothing like this.
“I knew it would be a lot of people, but I didn’t know it would be that many people,” he told me.
He spent 18 hours each day playing Pokémon Go. He says he had a great time and wants to do it again.
It was Crowe who led our group to a 5 a.m. “Raid Train” at Lincoln Park, ahead of the official Go Fest event at Grant Park we’d be participating in later. As soft rain started falling, we wandered the park, capturing all the Pokémon that we could and watching players trade and join raid battles. This wasn’t the main event. It was a social gathering and a preview of the big show to come later that day.
The big Mewtwo raid finale
I wasn’t expecting to experience cognitive dissonance when I arrived at Grant Park with my group, but it happened as soon as I saw a gigantic pink inflatable Jigglypuff near the large park fountain. In the game, I think of Jigglypuff as tiny; here, the Pokémon was easily 10 feet tall.
Throughout the park, team banners, lures and spinning Pokestops were blown up to huge proportions, dotting a vast expanse with colorful landmarks.
The Pokémon Fossil Museum exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum is an alternate history of Pokémon evolution.
Fake fossils, but awesome ones
We kept raiding and trading over the evening and the next day, but our next big event was a visit to the Fossil Museum.
Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History is a real museum, with exhibits of actual fossils, but for the event, curators set up fossil exhibits of the various Pokemon characters. And they took their job seriously.
Far from a simple one-room pop-up, the carefully arranged exhibit features detailed descriptions and full skeletons of Pokémon characters, plus other artifacts like fossilized (fake) poop and Pokémon insects trapped in amber.
I felt bad for the parents of little kids who had to straddle the line between telling them that this exhibit isn’t real and letting those kids enjoy an incredibly imaginative presentation.
The exhibit was followed by a robust gift shop featuring only Pokémon merchandise and open exclusively to attendees. There was a five-item limit, and the hot item, limited to one per purchase, was an Excavator Pikachu plush.
The exhibit runs through April 2027.
