Ghost town

City landmarks featured in game lost to development.

Miss the World’s Biggest Bookstore? How about the Guvernment nightclub? These are just two of the landmarks plucked from Toronto’s recent past that live on in the alternate universe of Pokemon GO. The augmented reality game, in which players prowl the streets to find game locations, only launched in Canada on July 17, yet some of its locations had already been gobbled up by Toronto’s rapid development.

Why do outdated locations show up in a new game? Paul Santos says it’s because they’re modelled on another Niantic Labs title, Ingress. The moderator for the Toronto Ingress gamers’ group, Greater Toronto Area Enlightened, says the locations of PokeStops and Gyms used in the game are identical to the “portals” found in Ingress. The places were chosen from fan submissions over the past three years. Santos estimates that 75 per cent of Toronto’s Ingress locations have been absorbed by Pokemon GO.

Santos, who has been playing Ingress since it launched in December 2013, explains that fans were once encouraged to submit locations to be included in the game. “In the early days of the game, things would get approved in a manner of weeks,” Santos recalls.

“They couldn’t keep up with the number of submissions that were coming in. Before they got rid of it last year, it was taking five or six months to get a portal approved. At that point they decided there was enough of a portal network out there.”

The Pokemon GO support site allows users to request the removal of PokeStops and Gyms, flagged as “dangerous,” “private property,” “not at this location” or “other.” But Toronto’s lost landmarks live on in the game regardless, even if they’re nothing but bulldozed lots.

Real-estate monitoring groups point to Toronto’s booming development to explain why the game’s PokeStops and Gyms are months, or in some cases years, behind the real world. One hundred and thirty con- do developments are under construction in Toronto according to BuzzBuzzHome, which monitors the Toronto housing market.

“Toronto is really in a league of its own in North America as far as the amount of new development we’ve witnessed recently,” says Matthew Slutsky, president of BuzzBuzzHome. “It makes sense that it would be more challenging than in other North American cities to ensure the locations accurately reflect the Toronto of today.”

At least Pikachu are adaptable to any habitat.