Interview with Articuno Island
We are delighted to interview Faeore, also known as Arti Cuno from the classic Pokémon fan website: Articuno Island (2000 - 2003), which began as Prussian Town Pokémon Network in 1998.
Articuno Island (formerly Prussian Town Pokémon Network, or PPN) was a Pokémon fan website that existed from 1998 to 2003. In addition to Pokémon news and creative sections, the website functioned as a network for other Pokémon websites to be discovered, with two of the largest Pokémon fan websites surviving to this day, Serebii.net (formerly known as Serebii’s Pokémon Page) and Bulbagarden (then known as Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden), being among them. We had the pleasure of speaking with Faeore (Arti Cuno), its webmistress, about her time running the website.
I am excited to be conducting this interview with you, Faeore! Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your website, Articuno Island?
Faeore:
Heya, my name is Faeore (Fae) and I formerly went by Arti Cuno during the beginning of the Pokémon fandom. I ran the fansite ArticunoIsland.com for many years with the help of many friends, some of whom I still keep in touch with! Together we kept updates about Pokemon news while I primarily focused on keeping the website's "network" running as well as [the] fanfic/fanart sections active. The network I created was one of the largest of its time in the Pokémon community. For the price of a link back to my website, I would then link to another person's site to help promote all kinds of Pokémon-related websites.
How did you first hear about Pokémon, what were some of your earliest memories of the franchise, and what was it like to be a fan of Pokémon online during the late 90s and early 2000s?
Faeore:
I was still in school at the time Pokémon made it to the US/Canada. It was a time when anime wasn't commonly available on TV outside of a select few that were being dubbed, but the popularity was exploding fast. My friends and I were big anime fans; when we started seeing the Pokémon anime showing up on TV, we became instant fans. So did many others at our school. The games started showing up shortly after. I still have my old Game Boy Pocket on display with my Pokémon Gold. Sadly I seem to have misplaced my first game, Pokémon Red. =( Even sadder, all my old Pokémon are long gone. RIP to battery-powered save files.
Back then, Game Boys weren't too common to see around where I grew up, but it quickly exploded as more and more people started showing up with their "toasters" (old, huge, original Game Boys) and the newer pocket Game Boys. I wouldn't say everyone was playing Pokémon, but there were certainly a lot of us. Even then, however, I was part of the "nerd squad" and frequently bullied by the "cool kids" for enjoying Japanese "kid" things. Still, I would see some of those same bullies hiding away from their friends playing Pokémon in a corner of the library at times. Socially, it was a crappy time. I'm glad to see Pokémon has grown so much over the years that people are so much more inclusive.
One thing I remember well was the huge lines for the first movie, Mewtwo Strikes Back, at our small theatre with people from all over the place swarming to get in. I went with three friends and we barely got in, many others were turned away. And that was on the second week of release. I remember being amazed at just how huge the fandom became in such a small time.
It sounds like Pokémania was as popular in the US as it was here in the UK when it all started in 1999! I was sorry to hear about your Pokémon Red cartridge and the inevitable death of your Pokémon Gold cartridge. Do you remember any of the Pokémon you had on your teams?
Faeore:
It's been a hella long time. I remember bits and pieces of things but not really the entire team so much. My very first Eevee was turned into a Flareon who made it to max level along with my Articuno, a Raichu, and a Nidoking. I can't remember which starter I picked! But it would have leveled to max as well. I played the heck outta those games.
Pokémon fan communities were popping up everywhere in the late 90s, mostly across free web hosting services such as Geocities and Tripod. What was your reason to create a Pokémon-focused fan website?
Faeore:
From the start, I had always planned to make my own website for showcasing my own art and writing, as well as my friends' creations. I soon realized how much of a pain in the arse it was to be found on the internet in that era.
I was lucky. I found a small following rather quickly since I was one of the earliest websites to show up to the English [Pokémon] community, but other sites with content far better than mine weren't. I began posting front page mentions of other websites, then realized I could follow a model I had seen before in other anime fandoms, "networking".
From personal websites for artists and writers to games sites where people made their own guides and reported on the latest news, I tried to help bring the community together as best as I could in a time when finding smaller sites through web searching was much harder to do. In today's internet world, we have art galleries like DeviantArt, ArtStation, Pixiv, Instagram, etc.
Back then, we had Elfwood and the owner was a hard arse about art sharing. Absolutely no fanart was allowed to be posted there until much later when they did make a fanart branch. So artists and writers wanting to share their fan creations often ended up scattered, posting on their own personal sites hoping for people to stumble into them.
Originally, your website was called Prussian Town Pokémon Network (PPN for short), before later changing its name to Articuno Island. What was the reason for the change?
Faeore:
PPN grew pretty quickly and moved up from a free hosting site to a subdomain with Bulbagarden. Along the way, I became good friends with one of the guys who ran the web server we were hosted by. Part of the requirement for being hosted on their service was to run advertising. During a conversation I don't remember all too well, I was given the option to move up to a domain-level site, and the fellas hosting me covered the domain purchase and everything else, all I needed to do was pick the domain.
At the time, I was currently writing the 3rd installment of my Pokémon fanfiction series that took place on "Articuno Island" and my friends and I decided it would be a much easier, shorter name to remember for anyone typing in the site from memory. Especially younger children who might not know how to spell "Prussian" but came to the site for Pokémon news or guides.
Your website included a large amount of content around the video games, animated releases, fake Pokémon content and sections dedicated to fan-created content such as fiction and artwork. Which sections of your website do you remember most, and which were you most proud of?
Faeore:
I love fake Pokémon! Fake Eevees were my life. So many Eevees... Def[initely] my favourite thing the site covered, getting to see other people's interpretations of Pokémon fusions and element-swapped Pokémon. To this day I still randomly doodle fake Pokémon, but apparently, the legacy has followed me to the point that some of my mythical creations for non-Pokémon worldbuilding are mistaken as fake Pokémon creations.
Based on some of the media assets that still remain from online archives, it would appear you were creating art yourself and incorporating your creations into your website! What kind of creative endeavours did you engage in during those early years?
Faeore:
I drew and scribbled a lot, but I would say I probably wrote a helluva lot more. My school pages were constantly covered in art, much to the teacher's dismay, but I [put] a lot more thought and effort into writing back then. Looking back, the writing is terrible. I had many fans who followed my work, but I certainly would call it a very early stepping stone for my current writing quality. I also took on designing the websites from scratch by myself. I wrote all the code by hand and drew the art needed for all the layouts. I guess learning HTML and web design was what led me to that path in college, but I hated doing it on a professional level and went a different route.
There were several sections of your website dedicated to fake Pokémon, such as screenshots, trading cards and even fake characters. What was your interest in these fan-created Pokémon?
Faeore:
I've always enjoyed creating and seeing others' fan characters for other comics/anime [series]/etc. From a young age, I wrote and drew stories from my favourite fandoms and made up characters for those worlds. Once I had internet access in junior high, I met other people online with the same passions and was introduced to the world of role-play message boards and shared story writing where one person starts and many people each chip in with their own pieces to make a collective written work. When it came time for the Pokémon fandom to take over my creations, it just made sense to follow the fan movements of making fake cards and original characters that branched off from the communities I had already loved being a part of.
Which Pokémon fan websites did you used to enjoy visiting, and why?
Faeore:
I'll be honest, I didn't have a whole lot of time to "follow" other sites a lot while also trying to keep up on producing mine. School, art, writing, and friends, all of those took up a lot of time as a kid. I spoke on ICQ (old instant messenger of the era) with many other site owners, but I never really spent a lot of time frequenting the sites themselves.
Like many early Pokémon communities, Articuno Island had its own message board where readers could come together and communicate. How would you describe your community back then?
Faeore:
The message board is possibly one of the things I remember the least. We came together to help each other out with game questions and discuss the games, news, anime, and all that, but we also had sections for creatives to share their writing and links to their art. But the Oekaki (art message board) was the bread and butter of the website. Artists being able to draw and immediately post to the message board was probably the bulk of our activity for quite some time. Discussions on art often lead to more art and thus more conversation. I can't think of any other Pokémon site at the time that had an active Oekaki, but many others did have message boards, so this set us apart at the time.
It has been around twenty-five years since Articuno Island first began. In the years that have followed, website designs have been optimised for mobile devices, social media have taken discussions away from message boards and guestbooks, and dedicated fan websites have dwindled. What are your thoughts on the evolution of the Internet since those days?
Faeore:
I actually enjoy the current system of fansites a lot more nowadays with the introductions of MediaWiki, Discord, and other forms of communication. I miss seeing the diversity of websites people would create back then, but I can't say if the changes that happened are for the better or worse.
I may no longer be running Articuno Island, but I still run a large fansite (with my husband) for another game. The site in question has been around since 2007 and is possibly one of the last big fan sites for the game. Having the site built on a wiki makes upkeep much more manageable than back in the day. Anyone can help edit, offloading the stress of having to do all the work yourself, all while having an easy way of monitoring edits others are making to keep an eye on bad actors.
We also run a Discord server with thousands of players from around the world who come to help each other. Live chat is certainly much more rewarding than the slowness of message boards, but I admit, there are times when message boards proved to be superior. Being able to keep a written, static, record of common problems and concerns in one area in long-form communication is something Discord lacks, though they're somewhat fixing that issue with newer additions to the platform.
Articuno began to move away from focusing on Pokémon exclusively, transitioning to anime and becoming more of a personal blog. What was the reason for that?
Faeore:
Once I moved off to college, I met more friends who introduced me to their massive collections of bootleg subtitled anime, Dungeons and Dragons, and the world of fantasy writing. It wasn't that I fell out of love with Pokémon, but I certainly became less involved with it after a time. New interests began to overthrow my free writing time, and creative world-building became my primary hobby. For a long time, I still played the games but didn't have the same passion for working on a Pokémon fansite [like] I did before.
As I quieted down from the Pokémon scene, game sites like Bulbagarden pushed forward and grew massive, covering anything I could have hoped to do much better and with more staff power than I ever hoped to manage. The network I had created quickly grew smaller as fans abandoned their personal sites for art galleries like DeviantArt, SheezyArt, and others that were popping up in droves, luring artists into new communities. Many news and games sites closed, faced with the same problems I had begun to experience. It's hard to compete with a giant site that does everything and cannibalizes any potential traffic from smaller, individual, efforts.
By 2003, the website closed its doors entirely, and Articuno Island was no more. Despite attempting to archive the website in 2010, and retaining access to the domain, the website is still gone. Do you have any intention of bringing it back someday, or at least providing an online archive?
Faeore:
I've thought many times about bringing it back as an archive; I still own the domain after reclaiming it from a hijacker years ago. After first being asked this question, I've had some time to think it over more and my issue lies in the content being very, very old and quite frankly... embarrassing. What's left of my personal art and writing of the time don't really have a place in my life now, and anything that was given to me to post back then by other people, I'm not sure where they are now to gain permission. I know if someone came back from the dead, and 20 years had passed, and that person began posting my old things on their website, I'd be kind of upset to find it without having been asked first.
For those who visited your community back in the day, people may be interested to learn what you have been up to in the years since. Could you tell us what you are up to these days?
Faeore:
Oh boy. I still talk to some of my main website contributors now and again, so they already know what I'm up to, but I'd love to hear from some of the old guard back in the day who I lost touch with. I'm still randomly playing Pokémon! I started playing Pokémon Go the day it came out (more or less, day one was a nightmare to get an account created). I took a break for a bit during COVID since we couldn't get out much but I got back into it a bit ago. I picked up Violet and Scarlet for me and my hubby to play together and a pair of 3DS for our kids to play some of the older games since we don't have 4 Switches and I don't trust them on mine. Ha.
I still draw, I still write. Nothing published, just a few million-word hobby [projects?] like it's always been. My art can publicly be found through my website IcePhoenix.com. And no, it's not based on Articuno, the Ice Phoenix name came first a very, very long time ago. =)
It's great that your kids are into Pokémon too! Are they aware of Articuno Island and the work you did back in the late 90s and early 2000s?
Faeore:
They were aware through passing conversations between my husband and me that "Articuno Island" was something I owned, but not really much about what it was. I mentioned to them recently, jokingly, that I knew so much about the older Pokémon because I had a website about them and maybe they should make their own Pokémon website someday. They gave me weird looks... It's kind of sad that my kids see making a website as something unattainable/impossible to do when it was something my friends and I saw as something fun and accessible back in 1998.
There are now over one thousand Pokémon and nine generations of Pokémon games, a significant increase since the days you ran your website. I am curious to know what your thoughts are on Pokémon today and whether you still consider yourself to be a fan?
Faeore:
Still a fan, still play, and still make fanart of stuff. Sun and Moon nearly broke me though, I didn't finish it. I wanted to yeet my 3DS out the window more than once with that dim-witted "the Pokemon called for help!" feature. I can name most of the 1K+ Pokémon, though I'm rough on some of the newest ones since I only started Violet recently and missed out on Sword and Shield. My kids will frequently ask me for help on their 3DS games as they're just starting to learn type weaknesses/advantages. Somehow, I'm still able to rattle off the elemental charts like the old adage of riding a bike. I find it kind of ironic that the same thing I and other fans did back in the day, making elemental-swapped Pokémon, came to fruition in the mainstream games.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to us, Faeore! While I never visited Articuno Island myself back in the day, it sounds like you were doing some great work to connect communities together, which has been quite inspiring! Do you have any final comments you would like to make to our readers, and to those who may have visited Articuno Island back in the day?
Faeore:
If anyone who visited the site back then is still around and reading this, I'd like to thank them for their patronage! The website couldn't have been what it was without the community of creators and fans that visited it. Knowing how long ago this was, it makes me both happy to have been a part of the beginning of the fandom and sad that I fell away from the community and lost touch with so many nice folks. From time to time I have run into people seeking me out (it's always a good day to hear from those who remember me!) so don't be shy about reaching out! =)
Interview conducted on August 14th 2023
Interview published on October 12th 2023