Roger Fingas
A 70-year-old man from Taipei, Taiwan has become famous for riding a bicycle equipped with 15 smartphones, all used for playing Niantic's Pokemon Go.
While many of Chen San-yuan's Pokemon-dedicated phones are Samsung models, five of them are iPhones, as is a separate phone he uses for actual calls. The gaming phones are mounted on the bicycle's handlebars, and connected to custom battery packs that can keep the phones going all night, The Japan Times said. Some of his trips around Taipei can last six to seven hours.
"I used one cellphone and then kept playing and playing," Chen explained. "After a month, it became three cellphones, six cellphones, nine cellphones, 12 and then 15." His current rig cost over $4,800, not including the roughly $300 per month he spends on in-game currency.
The reason for using so many phones is so that he can achieve higher levels faster, and capture rarer creatures. Pokemon Go transposes some of the gameplay of the console Pokemon titles to the real world, requiring people to actually walk or ride around not just for captures but to stock up on items.
The game was a runaway hit when it first launched in 2016, becoming a media sensation with scenes of dozens of players flocking around real-world places. This initial popularity has waned, but the game is still 41st on the App Store's free downloads chart, beating out the likes of Hulu, Venmo, Yelp, SoundCloud, and PayPal.
Charles Martin
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5 Comments
Where the world is going? Will be interesting to see current generation get senior.
This guy looks so cool on the second photo
hilarious X)
Now that’s hardcore gamer.
It's great to be out there on the bike getting all the exercise. That's a big plus. But the $300 a month on this game? To me that just seems silly. I'm sure the company is his biggest fan. That may be like 15 normal big spenders every month, but it's 1 person. Yet another reason why I don't like Freemium games and rarely will download them, let alone pay anything. I'd rather flat out buy the program. This is the problem with freemium games where as you advance, things cost more and more real money.
$300 a month for this game, I can look at it as buying a new Xbox One or PS4 every month. Or 1 game console and 6 new games a month at a normal price. Or a game subscription that's a fraction of that $300 price point. It's a lot of money for what is a freemium game!!! If it was $300 after a year, OK, a little much, but got a year. But it's every month. That is $3,600 a year!!! No grand kids to take out to the park?
I don't even think his bike is worth $300 looking at it. What that phone mount rig cost? But the bike its self? I don't get it. If it gets him out on the bike, OK, but 15 phones is almost like cheating. Doesn't that take away some of the fun out of the game? $300 bill every month for the game would take a lot of the fun out of the game for me. I think the bigger issue may be a addiction issue with this game, as others have had with other games where they spend so much time and money playing the game. At least he's on the bike all day instead of sitting all day.