Map
Background
In December 2024, Pokémon GO & McDonald’s announced a sponsorship featuring exclusive in-game Raids and Lure Modules at participating McDonald’s locations. Niantic never published a list of which restaurants were taking part, and the one-hour event windows left trainers guessing — a problem the unexpected appearance of the Legendary Kyurem made expensive to get wrong.
This project closes that gap for the Phoenix area: a single, readily accessible resource showing which McDonald’s locations are actually sponsored, so time during an event goes into travelling between raids instead of hunting for them.
How the data was built
- Data collectionParticipating locations were crowdsourced from Niantic’s Campfire app and associated community resources. The raw data arrived as city and cross-street notes only — no precise addresses.
- Verification & cleaningEach entry was cleaned in Excel and cross-referenced against Campfire’s map filtered to Gym locations, confirming it as an active raid location and excluding non-raid points such as PokéStops.
- Address & coordinatesVerified raid locations were matched in Google Maps to recover exact street addresses plus latitude and longitude for accurate plotting.
- Map generationThe compiled dataset was rendered into this interactive map with Python and the Folium library, making location clusters visible at a glance.
- DeploymentThe map is hosted and shared with the Arizona Pokémon GO community as a route-optimization tool for sponsored event dates.
Looking ahead
The design is deliberately adaptable — adding a new sponsorship means supplying new location data, not rebuilding the map. With Niantic announcing partnerships with retailers like Best Buy, GameStop, and Target and Walmart, the same framework can be pointed at whatever comes next.