Interview with Psypoke
An interview with Frost, one of the admins of the classic Pokémon fansite, Psypoke! The community dates back to January 1999, and has provided news, guides, and tools to aid players.
Psypoke is a Pokémon fansite that was launched on January 18th, 1999 by a Pokémon fan called Abra Kadabra (Abra K). The website has lots of useful guides and tools to aid players through the Pokémon video game series, including a detailed Pokédex. Frost, a member of the team who has been managing Psypoke since 2002, kindly agreed to an interview, detailing his memories of the website, his passion for collecting Pokémon cards, and his experiences with the Pokémon series.
It’s great to speak with you, Frost! Please introduce yourself and the website you represent!
Frost:
Hi, I’m Frost, and I’m one of the administrators of the current version of Psypoke, which
launched in 2002. Before our version of Psypoke launched, I was one of the moderators on the message boards for the original version of Psypoke in 2000. I became a Pokémon fan in 1999, when I was 11 years old, and I’ve stayed up to date with the franchise pretty consistently since. Other than the Power Rangers/Super Sentai franchise, Pokémon’s been the longest fandom of my life.
I work security as my full-time job and dabble in a little bit of everything – in addition to
Psypoke, I’m a co-admin for a Survivor (the reality TV game show) message board and Discord server; a Twitch moderator for one of my friends AlpinAlbench, who streams variety content including Pokémon Nuzlocke challenges; and an associate producer for the upcoming horror short Macabre, written and directed by my acquaintances Erik Champney and horror movie YouTuber Zack Cherry. But Pokémon and Psypoke definitely have played a huge part [in] my life so far.
The history of Psypoke dates back to January 18th, 1999, when it was created by Abra Kadabra (Abra K), who ran the website until his departure on November 7th, 2000. You joined the community around a year earlier in late 1999. What are your earliest memories of the website?
Frost:
My family was fortunate enough to have home computers and Internet access in 1999, and I
spent a lot of that year searching for whatever Pokémon information I could find. Abra K’s Psypoke was surely one of the many Pokémon fan pages I found that year, but I know for sure that I joined the message board on December 29, 1999, when I was still 11 years old. The Japanese version of Gold and Silver had [been] released around that time and I was looking for any information (okay, and ROMs, but don’t tell Nintendo that! I own four physical copies of those games now, I promise!). I think Psypoke’s board came to my attention as that particular incarnation was hosted on Coolboard.com, which also hosted Pojo’s message board at that time, and I was checking Pojo a lot for TCG articles.
Psypoke’s message board community was pretty tightly knit, and my memories of the site itself only become more clear after I became a moderator in the middle of 2000. I don’t actually remember if Abra K had any say in the board back then – the Coolboard was moderated [by] a user who might not have even liked Pokémon, and one day they just gave mod powers to a bunch of forum regulars, including me. There was also an interesting divide in the IRC chatroom of Psypoke – #psypoke on Mediadriven was a very big channel that I still see some users remember today, but my memories of it are more of a generalized chatroom and not really Pokémon-specific. Eventually the Pokémon fans on the forums got our own channel, named #psypokeboarders, because of this divide.
I checked Psypoke the site more often after that point. I remember Abra K had an editorial section and one of his rants praised Parasect as the premiere Psychic-type killer in Generation 1 (which, with 25 years, is a funny statement to anyone familiar with the RBY metagame, but a lot of us didn’t know any better back then!). I know Abra K’s Psypoke had some sort of Java application Pokédex but I could never get it to work, and we used to poke fun at the amount of ads that Abra K had on his site. Looking at his Psypoke on [the] Wayback Machine now, I can recognize and respect his hustle a lot more because he was hosting entire sites under the Psypoke domain – I believe Serebii’s site was among those for a brief time in 2000.
You are in a privileged position to have grown up with Pokémon during the early days of its release outside of Japan, a time known as Pokémania. What was it like to grow up with Pokémon during that era?
Frost:
There are very few moments of fandom in my lifetime that match the feeling of getting into
Pokémon right at the peak of its fad stage. I was [in] fifth grade (10-11 years old) when Pokémon came to America, and it felt both as if it had come out of nowhere and [like] suddenly it was everywhere. I didn’t have a Game Boy until Pokémon became popular, and nothing [that] I learned via osmosis about the series made any sense to me – Raichu was Pikachu’s “older brother”? “Mewthree” and “Pikablu” and “Pokégods” were mythical things you could supposedly find in the video games?
At that time, Pokémon was airing on my Kids’ WB affiliate weekdays at 7 AM, just before I went to school. I woke up one Wednesday morning, right after the show had rotated back to the beginning of the series, and the first episode I saw was the third one, “Ash Catches a Pokémon.” I had never watched any anime before this, so it was a strange and enthralling experience to me. Caterpie is still one of my favorite Pokémon just because it was so lovable in that episode, and it sort of ended on a cliffhanger that had me coming back until I was caught up with the anime (which, at that time, was only about 40-50 episodes into the Kanto saga). A few months later I…. acquired Pokémon Blue, and [I] played through the games that summer until my parents got me a Game Boy Color with Pokémon Yellow that Christmas. It was the yellow and blue Game Boy Color that had Pikachu, Jigglypuff and Togepi on the display. I still have it somewhere and it still works, even though the screen is scratched up and the speaker got blown out years ago.
It’s funny now that we have over 1,000 Pokémon and nine generations, but there being 150 Pokémon felt like such a massive amount when I was 11 and as if I could never actually get them all – it took me until my 20s to get a card of every Kanto Pokémon in my TCG collection, and I only got my diploma for getting all 150 in Blue when I was 31! I really miss those halcyon days of being naive and optimistic and uninformed about all the inner mechanics of the games. By the time Ruby and Sapphire dropped in 2002, I understood things like IVs and EVs, and that kind of advanced knowledge drained some of the fun out of playing the Pokémon games for me.
Which other Pokémon fan websites and resources did you enjoy visiting back then?
Frost:
In the early days of the fandom I was looking for Pokémon content any way I could, and back in those days you could find so many small fan sites hosted on Geocities or Angelfire or whatnot that I can’t even remember anymore. Before I found Psypoke I was definitely checking The PokéMasters a lot for game news and I specifically remember their Gold and Silver walkthrough where the writer had found a shiny Donphan [in] Victory Road – these were more naive days where I thought it was a scripted occurrence like the shiny Gyarados and that I would find the same. Never did!
I was also checking Pojo a lot back then because they had a section of user-submitted card
strategies and tips that I checked often. GameFAQs’ guides and message boards for the Pokémon video games were big time sinks for me. There was also a smaller site, called Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite, which had little shrines to some of the more overlooked Pokémon, primarily from Generation 1. That site’s presentation and mission statement informed a lot of how I approached the Pokémon franchise since I tend to like a lot [of] lesser loved Pokémon as well (my favorite is Dewgong!).
After our version of Psypoke was established, I tended to frequent Bulbapedia a lot because
the scope of its information was so extensive and covered things Psypoke didn’t, such as the anime, the manga, etc. or even just general things about the franchise that didn’t really fit into our Pokédex or guides. And I’ve always checked PokéBeach a lot since it launched, but I especially started visiting that site regularly after I got back [into] the TCG as an adult at the end of 2008. I really respect WPM’s dedication and that he’s been doing his thing for over 20 years now.
In October 2002, you were invited to join the team as a webmaster. How did that opportunity come to you?
Frost:
After Abra K left the site, I remember that the webhosting plan of the original psypoke.com expired at some point in 2001, and the original Psypoke Elite Four (Kirbster, Deadeyedave, Nova and darkmind) had spent about a year trying to relaunch the website, but nothing ever materialized. Sometimes there’d be a new bulletin board and then it would disappear. I remember being asked to collect some information from Pokémon Stadium 2 for use on the site in 2001 but nothing ever came from that either. In the meantime, two members of the forum community, Amphy and TonberryKing, put together a small resource of Gen 2-related pages called the Psypoke Gear. Sometime in 2002, they got to talking with darkmind, who was the only member of the Elite Four still around at the time, and eventually they got to work on the new version of Psypoke toward the end of the year.
With no active website and only a very small forum and IRC chat, the Psypoke community at this time was incredibly small, about 15-20 people total. But I was still around through it all, and when TK [TonberryKing] needed help compiling text files of Pokémon data that he would process on the new site to create a Pokedex using PHP scripting, that’s where I came in. DM [darkmind] and TK were also trying to make an IRC-based battle simulator for Generation 3, and I helped them with those as a test player. I don’t remember there ever being a moment where the others said “Congrats, you’re an admin now,” I just kind of snuck in there because the four of us were all interacting so much to get the site restarted.
Since Abra K left the website, the website became a shared responsibility between multiple admins. What was the working relationship like at Psypoke during its most active period?
Frost:
I think it worked really well because we all specialized in different things and the four of us got along so well. Amphy and TK were schoolmates and knew each other in real life; they lived in New Zealand at that time, and I’m in New York but I was always more of a night owl, so our schedules aligned pretty well when we were teenagers. Amphy could translate some simple Japanese and was generally a very affable person, so he posted a lot of the news updates. TK was eager to learn coding and put together the site from a technical aspect. Darkmind was also a coder, but she would often have periods coming [into] the picture for a while and then going on hiatus. I was willing to do a lot of the tedious work like collecting information for TK to display on the site.
We were able to collaborate with each other pretty freely. We tried a lot of ideas to get more eyes on the site in our first couple of years and some of them were silly, didn’t work, and got scrapped – there was one incarnation of Psypoke where we tried a megasite covering Pokémon, Smash Bros., Final Fantasy, music, and some other things (Pojo also had adopted this approach at this time) before we realized it was a bad idea and culled all the pages that weren’t Pokémon. When we lost our webhost sometime in 2004, I suggested we try classicgaming.com, which was a subdomain of IGN at that time, and I remember TK and I worriedly counting down the time because the application said somebody would get back to us “within 48 hours” (it took longer than that, but they did accept us and we were hosted by IGN from 2004 until we left them in 2011).
Eventually another longtime member of the Psypoke community, Jigglypuff, took on a lot of the coding duties after darkmind, Amphy and TK “retired” in 2007. (TK was still around behind the scenes, and mostly created features for the site if I asked him enough, since we had become very good friends by this point.) Jigglypuff also became a very capable coder and he’s worked a lot with me this summer as I pushed to get the Psydex updated for the more recent generations. I’m very fortunate to have met all of these people.
Psypoke's Psylab contains some handy guides on game mechanics, while the Psydex contains detailed information about Pokémon from the video games and useful tools to learn more about them. Tell us more about the development of these sections of Psypoke and how important they are to the website.
Frost:
I think the Psydex is our most important feature, and that’s why I’ve tried to keep it current even as the rest of the site has remained untouched for the last few years. Back in the ancient days of the fandom at the turn of the century, I remember it being incredibly hard to find a detailed Pokédex on Pokémon fan sites, as they were often cobbled together shrine pages on Angelfire or had a lot of misinformation. The original Psypoke, from what I recall, had an embedded Java application as its Pokédex that I couldn’t even get to work on my computer when I was 11, so it was very important for us to have a Pokédex that was a valuable resource for people who actually played the games.
Assembling the information for the Psydex back then was done through text files that TK would process using PHP. These days we have a MySQL database, and databases are one of the few computer coding-adjacent things I can understand, so I can add in new information or revise inaccurate old information using that. I spent a lot of this summer compiling all of the Pokémon, Ability and move information from all of the recent main series games – Let’s Go Pikachu & Eevee, Sword & Shield, Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, Legends Arceus, and Scarlet & Violet. Some of this information is really long and tedious to put together, especially the level-up moves for each Pokémon in each game. I also remember collecting all the sprite and model images for the Picdex were large and involved tasks back in the day, such as cropping out screenshots of the Pokémon mid-animation in Pokémon Stadium, or putting together the animated Emerald sprites.
The Psylab came into being because there were a lot of elements in the Psydex, as well as
universal elements across multiple generations of Pokémon, such as happiness, breeding, critical hits, and others, that required further explanation in a dedicated section. A lot of the tables for these pages are dynamically generated using information from the database, so some of them might be more current now that we’re adding the generation 8 and 9 data into the Psydex. Whatever else is outdated from those Psylab pages is the content I would like to get modernized eventually if I can.
Based on my research, it was clear to me that fans really appreciated the work that went into the guides and tools the website had. What are some of your favourite pieces of content and other features from the website, and why?
Frost:
My absolute favorite feature on Psypoke is a bit of a dark horse choice, but it’s the Amnesia Attack game. This is basically analogous to the website Sporcle and one of the features I think I talked TK into coding 15-20 years ago. I still occasionally try to do the “name every Pokémon” or “name all of the attacks in Generation XYZ” lists to see if I still can.
After that, obviously the Psydex is a resource that I reference a lot if I’m playing one of the games and need to know information like level-up moves or TM compatibility. And of course, the TCG section of the Psydex’s Picdex, since those scans are all my personal cards. (I haven’t gotten around to updating the TCG scans since 2018, but it’s on the list of things I want to get done soon.)
I have found it very humbling to see that people still remember us and link to our stuff, such as our IV calculator or pages such as the Happiness guide. I was looking through the Psylab earlier today and forgot how much I wrote for Psypoke throughout the years: the happiness guide, the status effects guide, the move priority guide, the critical hits guide, the HeartGold & SoulSilver and Black & White walkthroughs, and virtually all of the attack and ability descriptions in the Psydex. There were other things but that’s all the written work I’m the most proud about.
Originally, Psypoke had a presence on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and it has hosted a forum since 2005, with over 23,000 users at the time of writing. How would you describe the Psypoke community during its time online?
Frost:
I have a lot of good memories, but I also have regrets. We were a very close-knit community, but the staff were also very young and impatient and could get cranky from having to answer the same questions from overeager young visitors repeatedly. The Internet was also in its wild child years and we had to put up with some crazy things back then – spam porn raids from troll communities, petty drama not worth detailing from other Pokémon sites, and lots and lots of silly fan mail like “If I point my GBA at my computer, could you guys download Mew into my game??” Cultivating an audience on the forums that was thoughtful and treated us as more than puppets to watch perform, while also not desperately showering us with fake compliments, felt like a struggle at times.
I was extremely socially awkward and struggling with depression, and the Internet in the mid-2000s was cruel and irreverent, so I was often combative with our forum members and used carelessly cruel language that I look back on as an adult and sincerely regret. I know Jigglypuff had good intentions when he added the “Talkback” function to our news posts sometime around 2010, but I also remember getting very fed up with the feedback we were receiving and lost my cool a lot from our visitors asking over and over again when the next section of the Pokémon Black & White walkthrough, which I was writing at the time, was going to be added to the site. I hope if there’s anyone out there from the Psypoke community of 15-20 years ago who thinks of me as a cruel person, I want them to know that I understand now and I do really apologize.
Still, despite any regrets, the staff and a lot of the forum members were wonderful people. The longest and strongest friendships of my life have been with other Psypoke members. Even if I don’t talk with some of them regularly, I still try to check in and see what they’re doing every [so] often, and we had some really talented and special people on our site in its heyday. I also met several members of the community in real life meetups multiple times many years ago, and there’s still a small private Discord of about a dozen of us where we keep in touch regularly.
At the time of interview, the front page of the website hasn’t seen an update since September 6th, 2016, and the Psypoke social media accounts are significantly less active than they used to be. That being said, work hasn’t completely ceased on Psypoke, as updates to the Psydex have continued. What is the current status of the website?
Frost:
So as time went on, we all got older and life just sort of happened. For the last several years of the website being actively updated until 2016, the main people working on the site were TK, Jigglypuff and myself, and we each specialized in different things. TK is primarily a coder, Jigglypuff is also a coder and had added a lot more social engagement aspects to Psypoke and was taking care of the social media pages, and I was more of an ideas person and writer. I had the most experience and knowledge of Pokémon out of the three of us, so if I wanted a new feature added, typically I would ask TK and universally he came through – he designed an entire program for me that could process the scans of Pokémon cards into image files that we display in the Psydex’s Picdex function, for example.
By 2016, TK and Jigglypuff’s interest in Pokémon had sharply declined. I don’t have the coding capabilities that either of them do, and I was also going through a rough time in my personal life when Sun & Moon released. It doesn’t help that none of us were ever that interested in providing continual news updates for the series in the way somebody like Water Pokémon Master does on PokéBeach, so Psypoke as a whole had just run out of steam at around this time. The website always got enough traffic that it could pay for itself through Adsense revenue, so that’s why we never took it down despite the number of years it’s been idle. I also closed the forums to new registrations in the last year or two because none of the mods are around anymore and mostly only spambots were joining and posting.
As my passion project has been scanning my collection of Pokémon cards and displaying them in the Picdex, sometime in 2018 I got the Psydex updated with all the Gen 7 Pokémon using our old but existing database systems. I was going to do the same for Generation 8 in 2020, but then COVID happened, I decided to go back to school for a bachelor’s degree, and the last four years just evaporated. I had spare time again this past summer and really wanted to get the Psydex current for the last two generations. I’m aware that the front page news updates are very old, and our layout is antiquated and very unfriendly for mobile devices, but those are unlikely to change unfortunately. So our current status is mostly inactive, but for now not completely dead.
What are some of your fondest memories of working on Psypoke throughout the years?
Frost:
The two major ones would be the times I met up with staff members in person. In 2009, one of our board moderators, TheCyberMew, and I drove out to Indiana for a weekend stay at a family cabin of another one of our forum moderators, Skull Kid (now known as mecharichter, he’s a great video game speedrunner). I met five board mods on that trip. Three years later, when Amphy and TK had traveled to America together, there was a big group meetup of nine of us near the Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio. TK actually has a poster of all the Pokémon circa Gen 4 that he’s had over a dozen Psypoke members circle and sign off next to their favorite Pokémon.
Some other fond memories include when IGN accepted Psypoke back in 2004 during the darkest days of our search for webhosting, when I had the HGSS walkthrough completed and ready to post to the site on HGSS’s exact release date in the US, and when TK, forever being a coding wizard, got the TechDex coded and up on the site within only two days after conceiving the idea. I remember I spent pretty much all of the summer of 2012 scanning my Pokémon card collection and felt such a huge relief when I was able to get all those scans up in our Picdex later that year. We also used to do April Fools Day jokes each year on the site, and by far my favorite one was 2011’s, where TK made advertisements for “Rebecca Black and Betty White Versions” as that was the year Gen 5 released in English and Rebecca Black’s song Friday went viral.
Some of the fond memories came long after we stopped updating the site regularly. I think the first time I realized the impact Psypoke had on people was in 2018, when I started watching Twitch streams of Nuzlockes by somebody who is now a Vtuber named Alpin Albench (I’m his moderator on Twitch). I didn’t know Alpin in 2018, but I brought up that I was an admin on Psypoke in his chat and he complimented Psypoke and said that he’d used it a lot growing up. Because I check a lot of Pokémon facts for him, he’ll often ask “Hey Frost, can I get a Psypoke Check™ on this?” while streaming. It’s a bit of an in-joke, but it’s also a reference at this point. I also saw a retweet from the “CEO of Sinnoh” Twitter account a few weeks ago with a meme about barging in on Misty’s date in HeartGold & SoulSilver that used a screenshot from my walkthrough. I got a big kick out of that, actually!
I’m sure there are some readers who are keen to hear how the rest of the team are these days. If you’re still in touch, how are they doing?
Frost:
A few of the Psypoke staff members are still in a small private Discord server together, so I am in touch with TK and Jigglypuff pretty much daily as we grumble about the state of the world and I post pictures of Pokémon and cats. TK is working as a AAA games developer (he’s worked on a few games that I own and it’s really fun to read the credits of a piece of media and say, “Hey, I know that guy”), and Jigglypuff is also working as a software developer in healthcare.
Amphy is an actuary, and we’ll hear from him very infrequently through TK. Darkmind was always an enigma, and we haven’t heard from her in a while, but since we’re all Facebook friends, she seems to be alive and well. Deadeyedave would pop in on our forums now and then, but it’s been a while, and we haven’t heard from Kirbster in nearly 20 years, unfortunately. The last I heard from him, Nova was working as a reporter on Sirius XM, but that was over 15 years ago.
Our version of Psypoke never heard from Abra K after we relaunched the site. Somebody claiming to be Abra K tried to contact us once, but I think that was a troll. I do wonder if he ever even knew about us, since he seemed to just disappear after stepping down from his version of Psypoke.
You told me that you are a keen collector of Pokémon cards, something I confirmed when I browsed over the Psypoke social media accounts. It’s quite the understatement! Tell us about your collection!
Frost:
Yes! So my fleeting first exposure to Pokémon was through the TCG – in 1999, I had a subscription to Nintendo Power, and they were doing a lot of coverage of Red and Blue that year. The March 1999 issue came with a Base Set Charmeleon insert card, which I brought to school in an attempt to act cool and like I knew anything about Pokémon at the time (I didn’t). I’m pretty sure a few months later the first Pokémon product I bought was Base Set’s Zap! theme deck, because it had Pikachu in it. I remember I was on a family vacation in Ocean City, Maryland the summer Jungle was released and checking out all the Pokémon cards that were on the boardwalk.
Fossil came out a few months later, and by that point my mom had tipped me off that I could buy booster packs on Wizards of the Coast’s official website for much cheaper than local stores that had scalper-like prices. I’m pretty sure the cost of Base Set packs on WOTC’s site was something ridiculously low like $2 USD at that time, and I got my Base Set Charizard from one of those orders. Base 2 and Team Rocket were also big releases for me at the time, but I skipped most of the Gym era when it was current and only checked into the Neo sets briefly.
I got back into the TCG in my early 20s. I found the artwork such an interesting way for the series to showcase the Pokémon, and the then-modern Generation IV TCG did such a great job at incorporating elements from the video games like alternate forms, in-game locations, and hold items that previous TCG generations hadn’t. At first I was interested in collecting all the unique artwork of my favorite Pokémon, and over the years that slowly expanded into getting as many unique artworks of every Pokémon. I have completed every English set from Base Set through Stellar Crown, as well as Japanese-exclusive sets such as the Vending series and the Gen 2 VS set. They aren’t master sets, and I don’t have all the holo subsets of Aquapolis and Skyridge, but otherwise they are complete!
Around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pokémon TCG products were difficult to obtain due to increased demand and resellers trying to turn a quick profit. The price of classic Wizards of the Coast era cards also increased significantly. As a long time collector, I am curious to hear how this impacted you.
Frost:
I was lucky in the sense that I completed all the older sets about ten years ago, before any of the market spikes and chaos on the secondary market that came with the launch of Pokémon Go, the pandemic, or social media influencers getting more eyes on the hobby. I couldn’t imagine trying to complete all those later Wizards of the Coast-era sets in the current landscape; even ten years ago, Skyridge was one of the last sets I completed, and I didn’t even try to go after the holographic subset, only the main 1-150 numbered set. Because I kept the receipts of all my online purchases from 10-15 years ago, sometimes it’s entertaining to just look at what I paid for single cards in 2010 versus what they would cost now. It feels like an alternate dimension sometimes.
I still love the Pokémon TCG, but it has become increasingly frustrating since Generation 7 and beyond. The pandemic and YouTubers hyping the hobby have played a role, especially in conjunction with the product shortages we had in 2020 and 2021, but other things have made collecting a more frustrating endeavor as well. Gigantic sets come out nearly every other month and the pull rates, I think, are terrible for how bloated modern sets have become since the Sun and Moon era. I find it a bit insulting that they lowered the pull rates for the rarest chase cards in the 2024 Scarlet and Violet sets – ostensibly because they re-introduced Ace Spec cards, but I suspect the change was because the year of Scarlet and Violet didn’t meet sales expectations after 2021 and 2022 were such big years for the Pokémon TCG.
The Pokémon franchise has grown to include over 1000 Pokémon across nine generations and shows no signs of slowing down. What are your thoughts on where Pokémon is now compared to where it was when Psypoke was first created back in 1999 and where it could go next?
Frost:
I have a very vivid memory of checking Abra K’s version of Psypoke in a computer lab in my middle school in June 2000 – one of my classmates saw the image of Pichu that Abra K had on the site banner and declared to the entire class, “Pokémon’s played out!” meaning that it was over, that it wasn’t cool anymore. For all of generations 2 and 3, I had this eerie sense that a lot of my classmates, who were all teenagers at that time, still enjoyed and played Pokémon but were too embarrassed to admit it because Pokémon was regarded as a game for babies. It couldn’t be more opposite [to] how the series is viewed these days.
Diamond & Pearl released at the end of my first year of college and it was refreshing because by that point, it was way cooler to be openly nerdy about things like video games. I remember playing Diamond on my DS in between classes and one of my classmates looked at me and asked, “Is that Pokémon? Hell yeah!” when I nodded. Ever since then, I’ve worn my Pokémon fandom as a public badge of honor. I have a bunch of Pokémon T-shirts, I used to wear my Mew, Jirachi and Meloetta pins on my uniform when I worked at Best Buy, and I caved in and started playing Pokémon Go in 2020 because all of my coworkers at my current job were playing the game when I got hired. (At this point, I’m the only one on the team who is still playing it and I passed all the others in Trainer level years ago, so I blame them.) It’s easy to mock Pokémon Go for falling into all the trappings of a mobile game, but it really did show me that Pokémon is a series that is enjoyed by everybody now.
I still play and enjoy Pokémon games. I know Scarlet & Violet had a very negative reception when they dropped, but I personally enjoyed them even though I can acknowledge they were extremely flawed. The three-year generation cycle that Pokémon has been stuck on after Generation 4 has churned out some really crunchy results, so I’m glad that it looks like Generation 10 might be coming for the 30th anniversary in 2026, rather than next year. Pokémon’s made of teflon and seems too big to fail at this point – another way the series today couldn’t be more different than when the initial two-year “fad” cycle of 1999-2000 had ended and Generation 3 was a hard reboot that turned off a lot of older fans – but I can always hope that Game Freak is listening and trying to do better with each new game. Unfortunately, they don’t seem willing or even equipped as a development company to address a lot of the more controversial complaints with the newer games, such as the incredibly low difficulty of the games or how a rotation of Pokémon and moves are now “Dexited” every generation.
We are about to reach Psypoke’s 26th year online, and while it is fantastic that the website remains online, in your opinion, what do you think is the future for Psypoke and its community moving forward?
Frost:
At this stage in Psypoke’s life, I think it’s more practical to regard as it more of a historical resource than something that has a future to plan out, especially because our free time as we approach our 40s is certainly more limited than when we were younger. But as long as Psypoke continues to pay for itself, it will always be there as a resource for people who want guides and data for the older Pokémon games in particular.
Even though being a “Psypoke admin” isn’t something I necessarily need to think about daily, it does often hit me that this [site] has been there for two-thirds of my life as of the time of this interview. And as long as I’m a fan of the franchise and still collecting the cards (I think after 25 years it’s safe to say I’m not going anywhere in either regard), as long as the Psydex exists I’ll try to get it updated – eventually.
Frost, I truly appreciate you answering my questions on behalf of Psypoke and helping us understand the history of the website. Do you have any final words you would like to share to our readers and fans of Psypoke?
Frost:
I feel like I’ve said a lot so I’ll keep this answer brief! On behalf of the other staff members, thank you. It does mean a lot to all of us that people still remember and speak warmly about this fansite that we put together 20 years ago when we were basically kids.
I’m incredibly grateful to Frost for taking the time to share his answers on the history of Psypoke. I wish the community all the very best of luck for the future. Furthermore, I hope Frost is able to continue building up his impressive trading card collection!
Interview conducted on October 1st, 2024
Interview published on November 14th, 2024
This was so interesting to read. I was a voracious visitor of Psypoke around 2009-2012 when I was heavy into pokemon in middle school and loved reading the walkthroughs and EV training guides. It definitely helped me to level up my game. Thanks to the staff for pouring so much love into the site!
As a member of the forum from back in '99, man, what an incredible look back. Glad to see the site still standing in some capacity, even though most people from back then have moved on.