In addition to being a psychic, I'm also a lifelong video game fan. These days I don't find myself with nearly as much time to play video games as I used to, but there is still a soft spot in my heart for the Pokémon game franchise. I haven't played any of the Pokémon games more recent than Pokémon Black, which came out in 2011. And by that point, my enthusiasm had waned enough that I stopped playing it about a third of the way into the game. I still don't know how it ends.

But this year, Pokémon turns 20. And the first Pokémon game I've been truly excited about since 2009 comes out: Pokémon Go. It's an augmented reality game for your smartphone, which allows you to catch Pokémon by bringing your phone to various real-life locations.

Part of why I'm excited about this so much is that Pokémon has always had a strong spiritual component to it. Many of the creature designs in the game are based off of creatures and entities from Japanese and world mythology. For someone like me, whose spiritual practice involves interaction with a variety of mythic beings, Pokémon represents my cosmology introduced into the world wearing the thin disguise of a kid's game. Back in the 1990's, there was a backlash to Pokémon by various Christian organizations, who rightly recognized just how Pagan the games are. Buddhist and Shinto paradigms saturate the games' core philosophical principles. Specifically, the games speak of the importance of living in harmony with nature and all within it. Can't have that!

Naturally, I decided to take a look at the astrology behind Pokémon's initial release date. I ended up using the chart for 12:01AM on February 27th, 1996, in Tokyo, Japan. That time makes the most sense to me for reasons I will likely fully articulate at a future point. Suffice it to say, it works for how I understand Pokémon's purpose in the world.

Nintendo has announced that Pokémon Go will come out some time in 2016, but has given no information more specific than that. Nintendo, as a company, is in the habit of holding off on concrete release dates, much to the annoyance of the fans. So I thought I'd take a look at the astrology of Pokémon's 20th birthday, to see if I can guess within a day or two the most likely dates for important events to happen for the Pokémon brand.

The first thing I noticed is that a very important event will occur just after Pokémon's 20th anniversary. I expect a major announcement to be made between February 28th-March 1st, most likely the morning of February 29th, JST. Possibly it won't be a public announcement, but something gets finalized internally, leading to an announcement 1 month later, on March 29th. Both February and March 29th are important dates according to my interpretation of Pokémon's solar return chart this year, and I believe they are the most likely days for a more specific release date to be announced.

April 29th is also an important date in the chart, and if I'm going to pin it to an exact time, midnight JST seems likely. Because of that timing, and because of how I understand game releases to work, April 29th strikes me as the most likely release date for Pokémon Go. Well, not just because of that. That is the day that Chiron gets activated in Pokémon's solar return chart, and Chiron has a lot to do with being in contact with the spirit realm. Ellias Lonsdale includes the phrase "energized tremendously by special occasions" in his interpretation of the degree that Chiron is at in this chart, 20 Pisces. Chiron gets activated around the same time as Jupiter and the asteroid Karma, and right before the lunar nodes. According to the chart, midnight on April 29th should be the most dramatic moment of the year for Pokémon, so if I were a gambling man, and I'm not, I would put money on that being the release date of Pokémon Go.

Now, keep in mind: I am not omniscient. One of the things I have found to be consistent in attempting to use astrology for prediction is that the archetypal energies frequently manifest is ways you can't predict, even as they are the exact archetypal energies you originally saw.

But I'm putting this out there, to be proven wrong or proven right, or more likely in the middle, as the year progresses.