John Hanke along with Steve Sellers created one of the first commercial massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), MERIDIAN 59, which was sold to The 3DO Company on the day John graduated from UC Berkeley in 1996. Hanke later co-founded Keyhole in 2001, which developed mapping technology for media reporting overlays used during the early parts of the Iraq War. Hanke then joined Google as part of their acquisition of Keyhole, where he oversaw the transformation of his technology into Google Earth and Google Maps. in 2010, Hanke was given resources within Google to create an internal startup dubbed Niantic Labs which crated the augmented reality location-based multiplayer game INGRESS. In 2015, Hanke led Niantic's split from Google in order to raise $30 million from Google, Nintendo, and the Pokemon Company for the development of Pokemon Go.