Pokemon Go was released this past weekend. It’s an augmented reality game, where players can walk around in the real world and catch Pokemon with their smartphones. For technologists, it’s been a surprise how fast installs and usage of Pokemon have grown and surpassed the installs for other popular apps, like Tinder, Whatsapp, and Instagram.

As of late (in the last year or two) there was the sentiment of the end of apps as we know it. Smartwatches and services like Google Now were coming out that broke out chunks of information for consumption across different devices. Innovation comes in fits and starts, and for mobile apps, there was a general feeling that there was nothing left to invent.

But then when Pokemon came out, we get sentiments like this, and lots of people retweeting it.

But these game mechanics and type of game have been around for the better part of a decade, at least. In 2005, I was thinking about location based games by making a game called Mobtropolis. It was a photo scavenger hunt, where you took photos of adventurous things that you did, and challenged other people to do the same. Needless to say, it was too early. This was pre-iphone. People were just getting use to sharing photos online with their real identities.

But lest you think I’m posing myself as an early genius–I’m not. Even as early as 2000, there was a Japanese collections game (the name escapes me now) where mobile players could walk around town and collect virtual items. The items belonged in set, and one of the goals was to collect as many complete sets as possible. In addition, players can play on the web as well, directing their team on an overhead map, like an RTS game, while the players in the field were like their troops.

On the US side, there’s been plenty of such Augmented Reality (AR) and Alternate Reality Games (ARG). There’s ilovebees and Ingress, which is the same company that built Pokemon Go.

None of these earlier games were nearly as popular as Pokemon Go, by at least an order of magnitude. So the question then is why? As any maker of augmented reality games will attest, most people want to play games in one place. It’s really hard to get them out of the house to make a game.

On the acquisition side of the equation, I think Pokemon Go says more about the draw of the brand than it does about augmented reality itself. There are pretty similar mechanics between Pokemon Go and Ingress, the difference being the story between the two.

Pokemon has the advantage of being a story that middle school kids grew up with. Middle school is a time where you’re old enough to remember nostalgically, but young enough not to be infected with a dismissive attitude teenagers tend to have. Many kids at that age still had their imagination intact, and given the story plus the cuteness of the pokemon, it’s a world that many kids wanted to inhabit. How many of them secretly wished Pokemon lived in their backyard?

In addition, the whole premise of the show are adventurers wandering the world in search of pokemon, where the actual mechanics of the game are baked into the story, making a great fit.

To me, the growth that you see with Pokemon Go isn’t an indication that AR is ready for primetime, but rather the power of good story telling. If you can capture the imaginations of people into which a world they want to live in–especially if that world is something they wished for as middle school children–they will turn that into nostalgia for you.

And nostalgia is what gets people over the initial barrier of moving around to play a game.

I’m starting to understand what Palmer Luckey is saying, that VR is fundamentally a communications device. Storytelling has always been baked into how we human relate to the world, and it’s not going to change between the different mediums. The difference will be how we’re able to tell stories. From Kurt Vonnegut’s story curves to Pixar’s storytelling nuggest, it may be prudent to learn how to tell stories, even as a technologist and product designer for VR.