In case you needed any more evidence that Pokemon GO is taking over both San Francisco and the world: Over 8,500 people have RSVP’ed for tonight’s San Francisco Pokemon Crawl from the Embarcadero to the Mission.
Depending on who you ask, San Francisco’s total population is between 830,000 and 864,000 people. This means that a body of people equivalent to about one percent of the city plans to assemble tonight for a five-hour marathon of Pokemon hunting on a route that stretches over three miles.
And nearly 30,000 people checked the maybe box on the event’s Facebook page. If they all showed up, it would be an assembly equivalent to over four percent of the city’s population.
Of course, anyone who has ever thrown a party knows that not everyone who says they will come actually does.
Still, the response ratio is nothing short of shocking. It’s nearly double the projections for last week’s meet, a figure that seemed alarming in itself at the time.
This means several things: One, anybody who invested in San Francisco-based Niantic Labs (the company that designed the Android and iOS-based game) has permission to finish off however much of the champagne stores you didn’t annihilate last week.
Second, anybody planning to be in the area of the crawl route needs to be aware that a big, wandering cloud of highly distracted people will probably be in the vicinity of roughly everywhere starting at 6 p.m.
The crawl has two possible starting points, one at Pier 3 and/or the Ferry Building and another at Dolores Park.
Both will probably follow a rough course that runs the length of Market Street and also touches stretches of Dolores, Guerrero, and 16th Street before eventually meeting and then scattering for bar hopping somewhere around 18th and Valencia.
Several local businesses, including the StrEat Food Park on 11th and the Myriad dining nexus at 2175 Market Street, are running deals to attract players. If you were planning on dropping by, be warned: It will get busy, and someone might keep trying to catch the Magikarp in your beer.
- Pokemon Crawl SF [Facebook]
- City census estimate [SF HIP]
- 4,500 People Meet For Pokemon [Curbed SF]
- Where To Catch 115 Pokemon [Curbed SF]
- Crawl Route Map