This is a retrospective post recounting my experience with Pokemon go in the initial months of its release. Despite the intense hype surrounding the release of the game, I had originally been skeptical of the game. It seemed to me that the massive hype leading up to the game would result in a wave of disappointment as the game couldn’t live up to what people had expected of it. Pokemon had such a huge impact on the childhoods of most of my generation, that in order for Pokemon Go to fill those shoes seemed impossible to me. With that in mind, I downloaded the app a week after its release to let whatever bugs that initially came with the app to get addressed. With the game I was pretty frustrated at first, because the system was extremely inconsistent on how good of a connection to the internet that a person needed in order to sign in. Sometimes I could sign in on merely 3G, but other times I would have trouble signing in with full WiFi connection. Despite these issues, however, the experience was not hurt because of the community that was playing the game (which was nearly everyone between the ages eight and forty five). During those first few months of the game, anyone could walk up to nearly anybody else on their phones and find that they had a common interest in catching Pokemon. It was easy to find people to play with and to tackle gyms together, because everyone wanted to. The game had a certain magic to it, that everyone tapped into, but found that the magic was lost after several updates which ruined the ability to track Pokemon and feel like a real Pokemon trainer who can track down the Pokemon that they want to catch. The game become disenchanted, because Niantic was more interested in protecting it’s revenues than the game experience of the users. These actions led a significant portion of their player base to quit. I didn’t quit because of the loss of a tracking system, but instead because it wasn’t the same as the game that I grew up with. I wasn’t able to trade Pokemon or battle in the standard turn based format. Returning to the game feels strange, with the many changes that they have made. Heres hoping that they introduce the real battle system eventually.