Pokémon Go Moved 2,000 Players Through a Synchronized Times Square Raid—Nine Years After the Same Engineer's Network Failed in Chicago

On July 10, 2026, nearly 2,000 players gathered in Times Square for a coordinated Mewtwo raid as billboards lit in sync with the in-game battle. Michael Steranka, who joined Niantic in 2017 to manage the inaugural Go Fest, watched it collapse under load. He oversaw this execution for Scopely, Niantic's new games owner. The infrastructure gap—from Grant Park's failure to Times Square's choreographed scale—reflects a decade of server maturation and live-service discipline.