AlistairB

all the game pieces were seeded by the ingress community. ingress is niantic's other geolocation game which has been running for a few years now. all the locations were user submitted and then reviewed (like setting geocaches requires reviewing). For pokemon they only used about 60% of the ingress database. basically the most popular ones (and likely not on inaccessible locations) there are a few in less than ideal locations but it seems to have worked for the most part