An interactive map of the McDonald's locations in Phoenix, Arizona sponsored for Pokémon GO — 31 crowdsourced stops, each verified as an active raid Gym and geocoded, so trainers can spot clusters and plan efficient routes before an event window opens.
Part of the Observation Deck.
To map and visualize the distribution of sponsored McDonald's locations in Phoenix, Arizona for Pokémon GO using crowdsourced and verified location data, giving trainers a single resource for identifying high-concentration areas and optimizing routes during sponsored events.
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 — combined with the unexpected appearance of the Legendary Kyurem — made guessing wrong expensive. This project addresses that gap for Phoenix-area trainers with a readily accessible resource for identifying participating locations and planning efficient routes.
The project followed a multi-stage process:
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Data collection — McDonald's locations in Phoenix participating in the Pokémon GO sponsorship were crowdsourced using Niantic's Campfire application and associated community resources. The initial data consisted of city and cross-street information, lacking precise addresses.
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Data verification and cleaning — The raw data was cleaned and verified using Excel. Each location was cross-referenced with Campfire's map, filtered by Gym locations, to confirm its status as an active raid location within Pokémon GO. This step ensured accuracy by excluding non-raid locations such as PokéStops.
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Address and coordinate acquisition — Verified raid locations were cross-referenced with Google Maps to obtain their precise street addresses. Longitude and latitude coordinates were also extracted for each location, enabling accurate map visualization.
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Map generation and visualization — The compiled data was used to generate an interactive map using Python and the Folium library, visually representing the distribution of sponsored locations so clusters are obvious at a glance.
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Deployment and sharing — The map is hosted on Netlify and shared with the Arizona Pokémon GO community as a route-optimization tool for sponsored event dates.
- 31 locations, collected as of 12/17/2024 (see the header of
mcdonalds-raw.txt). The sponsorship ran four separate weeks through March 2025; nothing has been re-verified against Campfire since collection, so individual stops may be stale. - One entry is not a McDonald's. Active Buckeye Community is included as a sponsored stop and carries its own marker icon. Any script that assumes all 31 markers are McDonald's will be wrong.
- Locations are baked into the page at build time. There is no runtime data fetch and no backend.
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
index.html |
The complete site — map, styling, and content in one self-contained file. No build step. |
phoenix_mickydeez.ipynb |
The Folium notebook that originally generated the map. See the warning below. |
mcdonalds-raw.txt |
Crowdsourced originals — cross-street notes as gathered from Campfire. |
mcdonalds-clean.xlsx |
The verified and geocoded working file. |
Built with: Python + Folium (generation) · Leaflet 1.9.4 + jQuery (runtime) · CARTO Positron basemap over OpenStreetMap data · hosted on Netlify.
Warning
Running the notebook overwrites index.html completely. Its final line is my_map.save('index.html'), and Folium's save() writes a whole new document rather than patching the existing one. That discards the site's styling, page content, accessibility markup, and basemap configuration, none of which live in the notebook.
The notebook also cannot run as-is: it references mcdonaldslogo.png and abclogo.png, which are not in this repo.
To change locations, edit the marker data in index.html directly, and mirror the change into the notebook's locations list so the two don't drift further apart.
This project's adaptable design allows for easy expansion to include future sponsored locations. With Niantic's announcements of partnerships with retailers like Best Buy, GameStop, and Target and Walmart, the existing framework can be readily updated with new location data.