Posted By Mat Lee in App Picks, Gaming, Mobile

BreakingModern — It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since Ingress debuted. On November 15, 2012, Niantic Labs, a Google startup, released a closed beta version of Ingress to Android users. It was a completely different interface back then, and if you were one of the lucky people who got in early, you have yourself a quaint little founder badge.

The game has been tweaked and hammered on, with changes being made to the servers almost daily. Sometimes the game would work, sometimes it wouldn’t. That was the price we paid for being part of a closed beta like this.

Two years later and an estimated 223 kilometers walked for me personally, my 6,900 hacks, 7,315 resonators deployed at 476 portals contribute a minuscule amount to the overall totals in the game. Niantic Labs released this cool infographic to show just how many people are actually playing Ingress today. One thing is for sure, the servers have gotten a lot more stable since the days of the closed beta. But, of course, we all expected that. The Shapers couldn’t break stuff forever.

Niantic Labs boasts over eight million downloads from more than 200 countries, with a total of 64,272,120 resonators deployed in over 178,137,520 portals. Those are insane numbers for a geocaching-esque game. But when you understand how large the mothership is that backs this alien scanner technology, it sort of puts things in perspective.

Ingress was, right up until July 2014, an Android-only game. This means most of those numbers represent a very active Android user base. I would be curious to see what the numbers are on iOS.

Do you want a quick review on Ingress? You’re just in luck, because I wrote one for Breaking Modern.

Do you play Ingress? What are your thoughts on how the game has developed over these last couple of years? Drop me a comment or an email, or hit me up on the various social networks we all hang out in.

Get Ingress for Android on Google Play or for Apple iOS. Check out the Niantic Labs homepage, too, for all the cool puzzle stuff.

For BMod, I’m Mat Lee.

All screenshots: Mat Lee