Highlights
- Pokémon GO celebrated its 10th anniversary with a live Times Square Mewtwo raid.
- Players earned an exclusive event Mewtwo and battled Mega Mewtwo Y.
- The celebration leads into the free Pokémon GO Fest 2026: Global event.
Ten years after a trailer imagined crowds of players converging on Times Square to battle Mewtwo, Pokémon GO ran the scene for real.
Scopely, which acquired the game from Niantic last year, bought out the district's screens on the evening of July 9 for a 10th anniversary event hosted by Sydnee Goodman. The 2015 reveal trailer played across the billboards before Mewtwo appeared on the screens and in the game, and more than 1,000 Trainers joined one of the largest in-person raids in Pokémon GO's history. Attendees at the New York event caught a Mewtwo available only to players physically present.
"This project was two and a half years in the making," said Michael Steranka, vice president of product for Pokémon GO at Scopely, who added that hosting more than 1,000 players in a single raid instance was a technical problem the studio had to solve first. Securing the venue took over a year of work with local authorities, complicated by the World Cup competing for space in the city in July.
Mega Mewtwo X and Y debut in Pokémon GO: The raid, and its glitches
Dance duo Loud Luxury played a surprise set before the main event, with rotating Legendary raids and special raid eggs appearing at Times Square gyms through the evening. Mewtwo then took over the area's gyms and Mega Evolved into Mega Mewtwo Y, a raid boss with a CP above 99,000. Near the end of the fight, players were prompted to raise their phones for a Unity Attack that weakened the boss for a Master Ball throw.
It did not run clean. Of roughly 1,500 Trainers in the battle, a few hundred lagged badly or dropped out entirely because of connection problems, some of it visible on the official livestream. That is a familiar failure for a game whose first large-scale event, in 2016, collapsed under its own server load.
Mega Mewtwo arrives worldwide
The Times Square battle was the reveal. The actual debut of Mega Mewtwo X and Mega Mewtwo Y comes at Pokémon GO Fest 2026: Global, running July 11 and 12 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time. Both appear in Super Mega Raids, and every Mewtwo caught from them arrives with at least one Mega Level already unlocked, skipping the initial energy cost. Super Mega Raids need a minimum of eight Trainers, and the bosses can raise shields that only Mega Evolved Pokémon can break.
The global event is free for the first time. Anyone who logs in during the weekend gets the Special Research, the bonuses and the boosted shiny rates without a ticket, including the research line that leads to Zeraora, the Mythical Pokémon making its Pokémon GO debut.
Pokémon GO launched in July 2016, built out of a Google Maps April Fools' stunt from 2014, and its catching mechanics were later imported into Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! on Switch in 2018. The anniversary run has already produced numbers: the in-person Chicago GO Fest drew more than 103,000 ticketed attendees and 717,000 active players across the city, who caught close to 108 million Pokémon.
