It’s hard not to have noticed that Pokémon Go fever is now sweeping the world, with millions of people having played and downloaded this latest mobile game made by Google spin-off company Niantic. And at first it even appeared that Nintendo had struck gold with the game, before the company itself admitted that it might not profit so much from the game as they did not develop Pokémon Go and only actually own a third of publisher The Pokémon Company.
But still, it is clear that Pokémon Go has become a worldwide sensation even if it was only released in a handful of countries first and its Japan release had to be postponed, much to the dissatisfaction of Japanese fans as that country is the one that gave birth to Pokémon…
People are still playing Pokémon Go like there’s no tomorrow though, and trekking the streets of their city in search of the cute little creatures known as Pokémon in what has become one of the most popular augmented reality games for smartphones ever released.
And one aspect of the game that is surely a lot of fun to get to grips with is evolution, that is, turning your Pokémon into more powerful variants by using in-game items known as “Candy” and “Stardust”. Evolution in Pokémon Go is normally just a case of having enough Candy or Stardust to evolve a specific Pokémon, for example the Pikachu, to a more powerful variant like the Raichu.
There’s one exception though, and that is a Pokémon known as the Eevee. When evolving the Eevee, the game randomly chooses one of three variants it will evolve to, known as Jolteon, Flareon and Rainer. The Jolteon has electricity-based attacks, those of the Flareon are fire-based, while those of the Vaporeon are water-based. You normally turn the Eevee into one of these Pokémon when you trigger the evolution process (randomly), but there’s a way to get the exact variant you want, and it involves a little name calling…
You see, fans of the game have posted a neat trick on the Reddit forums explaining how to do this, by renaming the Eevee Pokémon prior to its evolution, according to gaming website eurogamer.net. By renaming the Eevee to to Rainer, you get the Vaporeon, by renaming it to Sparky you get the Jolteon and by renaming it to Pyro you get the Flareon.
But where do this names come from you ask? These happen to be the names of the Eevee brothers, who have a reunion with the gang in one episode of the Pokémon TV series to discuss Eevee evolution…
This is certainly a neat trick and Easter egg in one of the most popular smartphone games of the moment, and with millions of people playing the game right now, it is likely that there are still plenty of tricks and secrets to discover in Niantic and Nintendo’s latest game. So happy hunting those Pokémon!