Pokémon Go

A free augmented-reality game released by Niantic in July 2016. The map is the real world, drawn from Google's data; Pokémon appear at real locations; you walk to them and throw a ball at the screen. Landmarks, parks and churches became gyms and stops, so the game's incentives ran straight into physical public space.

It first appeared in 2016, during the platform era.

It produced scenes that had no precedent: hundreds of strangers running across a park at once because a rare creature had appeared, crowds outside museums at three in the morning, police forces issuing statements. Within days it had more daily active users on American Android phones than Netflix, and it made the abstract idea of augmented reality concrete for a general audience in a way a decade of demos had not.

It went on to over a billion downloads and six billion dollars of revenue, and it caused genuine problems — traffic accidents, trespass, security restrictions at memorials and government sites. The summer itself did not repeat, and the game settled into a large, durable, much quieter existence. Every later location-based product is measured against those six weeks.