Pokémon Sleep

Submission 10,506

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About

Pokémon Sleep is a Pokémon-themed mobile video game and a sleep-tracking app developed by Select Button and Niantic in which monitors user's sleep patterns, rewarding them for for sleeping enough and well. The game was released in July 2023, inspiring discussions, memes and fan art.

History

On May 28th, 2019, The Pokémon Company held a press conference announcing upcoming Pokémon content. In addition to announcing a Nintendo Direct for Pokémon Sword and Shield on July 5th, they announced Pokémon Sleep, an app Tsunekazu Ishihara, president and CEO of The Pokémon Company, said aims to turn sleeping into entertainment as Pokémon GO did for walking. The app is planned for release sometime in 2020.

They also announced the Pokémon GO Plus +, a piece of hardware that acts similarly to the Pokémon GO Plus device in that it alerts players of nearby Pokéstops, with the added function of tracking "simple information on how long you sleep."

On February 27th, 2023, the official trailer for the game was released on YouTube^[6] (shown below).

Between July 16th and 18th, Pokémon Sleep was launched worldwide for iOS and Android.^[7]^[8]^[9]

Gameplay and Features

Pokémon Sleep gameplay is split into two parts, day and night, with the former complementing the latter. During the day, players are tasked with providing food and drink for Snorlax, and during the night, the app tracks the quality and length of the user's sleep, calculating their sleep score. Sleep score is multiplied by Snorlax's strength to calculate Snorlax's Drowsy Power, which attracts Pokémon.

On July 6th, 2023, a gameplay demonstration video was released on YouTube,^[10] gaining over 630,000 views in two weeks.

Online Presence

Announcement

The announcement was covered by multiple news outlets, including CNN,^[1] Polygon,^[2] and The New York Times.^[3] Online, Twitter users joked about the announcement in a variety of ways. User @merrittk^[4] joked about further potential healthy-lifestyle apps Pokémon could introduce, gaining over 2,900 retweets and 9,800 likes (shown below, left). User @Garrts_^[5] joked about the app with the lyrics of Chop Suey, gaining over 2,000 retweets and 4,600 likes (shown below, right).

On YouTube, GameXplain posted a discussion of the entire press conference immediately after it aired, gaining over 60,000 views (shown below, left). User Austin John Plays did the same, gaining over 200,000 views (shown below, right).

Release

Upon release, the game drew attention online, becoming a subject of discussions and memes. For example, on July 16th, 2023, Twitter^[11] user @RexProfessor posted a photograph of themselves sleeping surrounded with phones with Pokémon Sleep turned on, captioned, "So yeah, I’m a shiny hunter." The tweet (shown below, left) gained over 370 retweets and 2,900 likes in four days.

Following the release, character Professor Neroli, a scientist studying Pokémon sleeping habits, achieved significant popularity within the Pokemon fandom, becoming a subject of memes and fan art (examples shown below).