NBA meets Pokémon Go: Inside the augmented-reality game NBA All-World

In January, the NBA and NBPA launched NBA All-World – an officially licensedgeolocation augmented-reality basketball game with Niantic, thecreators of Pokémon Go.

Just like with Pokémon Go, users are encouraged to exploreneighborhoods around the world and encounter today’s NBA stars.Users can challenge the NBA players one-on-one, add them to theirteam, level them up and compete to become the ruler of real-worldcourts, while also collecting gear from well-known brands (such asadidas, Puma and Todd Snyder).

BasketballNews recently caught up with Marcus Matthews, thesenior producer of NBA All-World. Prior to joining Niantic,Matthews spent the last few decades working on various sports videogames including the original NBA 2K, NFL 2K, NHL 2K and NBA Action98.

In this Q&A, Matthews opened up about the inspiration forthe game, lessons that Niantic learned from Pokémon Go, the futureof video games, advice for anyone who wants to work on video gamesand more.

How did this idea come about and what was theinspiration behind NBA All-World?

Marcus Matthews: “I’ve been at Niantic forabout two years now and the inspiration for the game came from ourCEO, John Hanke, who is an avid basketball fan. He playedhigh-school basketball in Texas and he’d play pick-up regularly incollege at Berkeley, and even now since he joined Google andNiantic. At NBA All-Star Weekend, we had a couple of pick-up gameswith Hanke and other employees. Overall, he’s a huge basketballfan. And with Hanke’s experience with Google Earth and map-based,location-based gaming, he was always just trying to find a way tobring his love and passion for basketball to this new platform. Mybackground in sports games goes back more than 20 years includingbeing the senior producer on the original NBA 2K and NFL 2K on theSega Dreamcast. I’ve always tried to look at the cutting edge withsports games and not just copy what’s already here, but try to movethe industry forward.

“So when I heard about this opportunity, I was like, ‘Wow, thisis amazing.’ Here we are with this new way of gaming, of turningthe real world into a gaming board, literally, and that’s thefuture: connecting the real world with digital bits and integratingthem and having all of these novel experiences. And I was like,‘Nobody has done that in sports. This is an opportunity to onceagain create a ground-breaking sports gaming experience.’ And thosekinds of opportunities only come around every blue moon, with theright technology, funding, resources and team. And I was like,‘Yeah, let’s jump in. Let’s see what we can figure out.’ So I camein and it was in gestation for probably about a year or two beforeI got there. My role was just to bring that sports-gaming,basketball experience and merge that with what was alreadyexisting, so we could create a novel experience.”

When Niantic created Pokémon Go, it was a huge successand introduced AR games to a lot of people. Since this game issimilar, were there any lessons that you all learned from PokémonGo that helped you while working on NBA All-World?

Matthews: “Absolutely. Pokémon Go was anabsolute overnight success, but there were still some challengesthat they ran into. We wanted to make sure that we took the goodlearnings (from Pokémon Go) and try to avoid upfront the negativelearnings that come with building something outdoors. Probably thebiggest challenge of building any kind of outdoor experience istrying to break that obvious habit of just playing games whereyou’re at. It’s not a console, it’s mobile, so you have access tothe whole world and environment right there on your screen. And ourgame isn’t really a screen-only experience, so we were just tryingto get users out of the habit of just doing everything on thescreen. We’re really trying to connect real-world places withauthentic experiences for your player. If there’s a bank or ATM inyour area, you can go get money for your player in our game. Ifthere’s a shoe store near you, you can go get shoes for yourcharacter. If there’s a clothing store or department store nearyou, you can go get apparel, shirts and pants for your player. Ifyou’re out and about, you want to remember to open up this gamebecause there may be some unique things out in the world that maynot be available at your home or your job. There are differentthings you may discover. That’s the main thing: (helping usersunderstand that) it’s a whole new way of interacting with theworld. We really want to enhance and improve users’ experience bytying real-world locations to virtual-world locations. We justthink that’s so novel, so different and so new. I think that’sgoing to be the foundation of a lot of games moving forward.

“And the other biggest challenge that we had was probably justthe randomness of the real world. With traditional games, when youlay out a world or environment, you have total control over whereevery object goes and how users are going to interact in it. We hadto kind of abstract that out, like, ‘Okay, well we’ve got this citythat has a lot of real-world game objects that we can use. But whenyou’re in the suburbs or rural areas, there are fewer items for usto tag and for you to interact with – whether it’s a court or ashoe drop or a boost or an energy or an arena pass. Now, we’ve gotto get a little more creative. How do we balance out the experiencefor people who live in different kinds of environments in terms ofdensity? We’ve been learning a lot and pulled a lot from Pokémon Goon those items like real-world game boarding, how to (get) ourplayers out into the world and how to balance that all out. Therewas definitely a lot that we learned from our other games.”