Interview with The Pokemon Factory
We interview Bonzai, the former admin of The Pokémon Factory, a fan website that began in 1998 with an emphasis on fake Pokémon creations. Bonzai worked on the website actively between 2002 and 2018.
The Pokémon Factory (PF) was founded on December 27th 1998 and was known for creating fake Pokémon in modified screenshots from Pokémon games, namely Pokémon Red and Blue. It was originally called Mewthree and Frogglet's Pokémon Factory, with Frogglet later leaving the site and his brother Aspenth replacing him. Over the years that followed, many different staff members and artists would join the team to contribute to the ever-growing fake Pokémon collection. One of these individuals was Bonzai, who has kindly offered to speak to us on behalf of The Pokémon Factory.
Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Bonzai. Please introduce yourself to our readers, and tell us a bit about your role at The Pokémon Factory!
Bonzai:
No problem at all, thanks for inviting me to do it!
My real name is Robin, and my PF staff avatar was called Bonzai. I'm aware that it's an incredibly weeb-sounding handle, but I swear it was a nickname given to me by a friend and not something I came up with myself lol. I still go by "bonzairob" all around the internet, and despite keeping it for personal accounts, occasionally, when I least expect it, the handle manages to sneak into my professional life...
I joined PF as a sprite artist in 2002, not long after starting high school, so as you can see, I am old. As the years went by, as well as spriting I was learning to make websites, so I ended up making the Advance and Delta Species versions of the PF site, for the Gen 3 and Gen 4 archives. At some point I kind of ended up running the place by default, I guess just from putting the hours in. When I decided to leave, I think I'd been there for about 18 years!
The website was originally founded by Mewthree and Frogglet in December 1998, but sadly they stepped down just a few short years later. While you weren’t a member of the team at that point, you visited the website regularly. What can you tell us about those early days of the community?
Bonzai:
It might be the nostalgia talking, but I remember it being pretty fun and cool! I think it all came together at a perfect moment, during the height of this new Pokermans craze, when the internet was becoming more widely available, and at an exciting time when video games were really firing up everyone's imagination. I remember Poryhedron was active even back then, maybe before he was hired, giving people kind and thoughtful advice on [their] submissions, where other early-internet communities might have dunked on inexperienced suggesters. Though some of that happened too... that's how Schimre's Lamer Bag comic got its name.
Also, I have to say this somewhere... Frogglet, the original artist, was brothers with Aspenth, whose artwork you'll see all over the original archive. Legend has it that the whole time Frogglet was there, he was passing off Aspenth's artwork as his own! But I heard from Schimre that he paid him in candy bars, so while it was kind of the world's first fakemon art theft, it wasn't a huge injustice.
I have to be honest; I had not heard of Schimre's Lamer Bag comic until you mentioned it in response to our question! Can you tell me more about that?
Bonzai:
I think it was off the internet for a long time, but I added it back to the site a few years ago, under the PF2 archive. You can read it here. It's not very long (unfortunately!)
It was very much from the heyday of sprite comics like 8-bit Theatre, and it has a special place in my heart. I've always loved Schimre's sense of humour, and having a genuinely funny comic based on my niche interest was great; it was probably my favourite part of the site back in 2003, and I was kind of obsessed with it.
You may notice the last one has me credited; I'd been begging to help out with it, and Schimre decided to give me a shot, but I think what I made was pretty terrible haha. He remade it in the end, but at least he kept some of my jokes!
When I was working on a PF game in 2016 or so, we were planning on adding a post-game event where classic-archive Pokémon would be coming through portals like Ultrabeasts, as a fun way to riff off their kind-of-weird aesthetics. Charbulble, Togetwo and Mewnine were going to turn up as friendly NPCs, disguised (badly) as humans, to help the player resolve it...
A PF game sounds pretty fun! According to the website, this game has been in development for quite a long time. What can you tell us about this project and its current status?
Bonzai:
I think my knowledge of the current project is probably outdated - Moppnttef updates me now and then - but I know they're dedicated to including as many of the PF archive Pokémon as possible, which is a gargantuan task. I believe they're also working with the (planned) storyline of the PF forum's official RPG, which had three Rocket-style teams (Uppercut, Lotus, and Shadow) vying for control of the region, which I always thought would make for some fun gameplay and storytelling. They have a Discord server, which is the best place to check for updates and current status. I'm not in there myself; I want to let them do their own thing!
The objective of PF was to showcase fan creations of fake Pokémon, displayed in screenshots of Pokémon games to look like they were actually from those games. What did you think of this concept when you first discovered the website?
Bonzai:
I mean, I was hooked right away. I think I was 11 when I discovered it by... I was going to say "googling Pokémon" but this was before Google was popular lol. I think I was Lycos-ing Pokémon on the family computer. Maybe I found Poryhedron's website first and followed the link from there.
I was astounded that this was even a thing you could do, to create artwork that looked like it came straight out of the games. I made a single, extremely bad suggestion that nobody could have mistaken for something straight out of the games, and then Game Freak absolutely stole it and turned it into Ho-oh.
And then there was the other work surrounding that - Schimre's sprite comic, fake TCG cards which I was into for a while, poster artwork, forum roleplaying - [and] it all opened my eyes to a new world of creativity.
Wow, Lycos? I think for me, it was Ask.com! (laughs). Did you visit any other Pokémon communities back then?
Bonzai:
I haven't thought about this for probably decades at this point, but I remember learning how to make fake TCG cards on Pokémon Aaah! - I can't believe that site is still going lol. I remember when Serebii.net was still yellow!
Other than that, I think I was happy mostly around the PF community, like following Poryhedron's fanfic - but this was back before the internet was so pervasive in everyday life, so my internet time on the family computer as a kid was limited.
There is a close association between Pokémon Factory and Pokégods, fake Pokémon that people would invent and claim were real. In fact, several of the names of popular Pokégods are shown in the archive of your website. Do you believe PF contributed to these rumours in any significant way?
Bonzai:
Yes, absolutely we did - but it was never deliberate. Even from the start, the goal was just to make things that looked official, without trying to pass them off as actually real. (Apart from one time when Gen 4 was being announced, and we wanted to see if we could get any traction with a fake CoroCoro page, haha.)
But for Pokégods, this was in the early days of Mews under trucks and Bill's secret garden*. When games were getting enough meat to them to really catch on your imagination as a kid, but where you had to fill in a lot of that detail yourself, and that Reboot/Matrix/Digimon idea of "the world inside the game" was full of magic and wonder!
So if your friend at school printed off some PF archive pages, and claimed his uncle who worked at Nintendo had given them to him, honest... it just wasn't as unbelievable back then. There's a reason that having an uncle at Nintendo became such a meme!
(* If you don't know about Bill's secret garden, take a look at the cliffs behind Bill's house in the Gen 1 games. A graphical glitch like that - where they couldn't put the house roof on top of a rock face - was enough to start thousands of internet rumours of how to go and meet all the Pokémon in the PC storage system!)
PF also has a cool Concept Art gallery filled with creations based on the fan-made Pokémon featured on the website, some of which you have contributed to yourself! What are some of your favourite concept art or fan-made Pokémon you’ve seen throughout over the years?
Bonzai:
I feel like I'm just going to start listing off all the amazing artists I've worked with, who I saw put in so much work lol... I'll include some images for my favourites.
Some of them are still making Pokémon art today, like Cacapulse who always really nailed that official style. But I could contrast that against Culthulhu's work, which was always really cool and striking. It wasn't always easy to convert into sprites as a teenager lol, and if we found out he really was an eldritch entity, I wouldn't be totally surprised, but it was super imaginative and badass.
Antarctros was an absolute machine, he would churn out an astonishing amount of great artwork, and Moppnttef wasn't far behind. They're both really skilled at what I find the hardest stage of making art - right at the start when you're trying to work out how a text description looks in your head. Moppnttef in particular is great at bringing out the unique ideas that the Pokémon is representing and keeping it all cohesive. He's had I think two or three of his designs win the Smogon CAP competitions, and it's well deserved.
You made an effort on the current website to display the history of PF, with a list of milestones and information relating to the community. What prompted you to do something to preserve the history of the website?
Bonzai:
I think I didn't realise it fully when I left, but it was 18 years at a really formative time of my life, and there's not a lot I can do to separate myself from it, because it shaped the skills I learned and now make a living from. All the work I put in there, and what the site as a whole represents, will always be part of me. For example, it's where I learned the difference between "it's" and "its", which really mattered in tiny Pokédex entries!
At its core, the site has always been basically kids drawing pictures for other kids, for no other reason than it's a fun and nice thing to do, both as a suggester and as an artist.
So you have this chain of people going back decades, and then also, the site's impact on the Pokémon fandom - both in a Pokégods sense, and also being many people's introduction to the idea of making fakemon. It's a weird little niche, but also, a weirdly important part of internet history, and I know how hard people worked on it - so it seemed worth recording everything I could find.
I'm really thankful that you were able to do it! I am curious, how much of the original PF do you estimate is currently lost? The history of these early days of Pokémon's fan community is something I'm personally very passionate about, and it's great to see it preserved for future generations.
Bonzai:
I think over the years, we've actually managed to collect most of the site content, thanks to fans who downloaded things and rehosted them when the site was having trouble. What we've definitely lost is forum threads, especially from a huge ezboard hack around 2005 which wiped out a lot of the older stuff. There's also the original 1999 board, which is on [the] Wayback Machine, but there's no easy way to go through it. One of my if-I-had-infinite-time projects would be to scrape all of the data from all of the boards and rehost it somewhere searchable.
December 27th 2023 will mark twenty-five years since the original community first began. While the original founders and many of the website’s team have gone on to do different things, do you expect there to be any kind of celebration to mark the occasion?
Bonzai:
I can't speak for the current team, but I'd love it if there was! Leading up to this interview I was trying to follow what contacts I had for early staff to see who I could get in touch with, but unfortunately I didn't get very far. Bitrot has taken quite a few of my leads, like Hotmail eating old email addresses, and AIM shutting down - the last time I spoke to Culthulhu was over AIM just after Obama was first elected. Of [the] people I could contact, some of them are busy and want to move on, some have had bereavements, and some are just uncontactable. If I ever got super rich, I'd hire investigators to track them down and invite them all to a party, but for now I'll just toast them on the 27th of December :)
What were your highlights of PF and working for the website?
Bonzai:
I think the absolute standout was the 10th birthday celebration. We decided to release something every day for a week, so one day was a new archive page, another was staff profiles, another was new concept art, that sort of thing. We prepared for weeks, and in the run up to it, most of the staff were working together in our private IRC channel, showing each other our work and keeping each other motivated. The reaction from the community was great, I wish we'd done more events like it!
We also decided to do something for April Fools one year, I can't remember why, where we all converted our avatars into memes. But like, old internet advice animals and that kind of thing. At the time it was very funny, but very dated now lol.
Sadly as the years went on, PF closed down and restarted on several occasions and interest in the community dwindled, with various admins picking up the torch and trying to continue where the old guard left off. While there is a small Discord community, it does feel like the factory may have shut down production for good. If that is truly the case, what do you believe PF’s legacy to be?
Bonzai:
Well, even if [worst comes to worst], it will always be embedded in the early history of Pokémon fandom and fakemon creation - but there are still people working on it today, just in a different form. They're working on a game, featuring all the archived Pokémon, so keep an eye out for that! I'd be very surprised if PF ever ended for good, but even then, I'd probably just restart it myself lol.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Bonzai. Do you have any closing remarks you would like to make for our readers, and to any fans out there who were a part of The Pokémon Factory?
Bonzai:
To your readers, thank you for listening to an old man reminisce about the glory days. To any PF community members out there, feel free to reach out to me if you see me around somewhere, and if any staff happen to read this, I'd love to get in contact!
I'd also like to wish the best of luck to the current team and their endeavours. Keep the flag flying!
A big thanks to Bonzai for taking the time to share his memories of The Pokémon Factory, and huge congratulations to the website, its staff, and their community for reaching its 25th birthday. If the original owners Mewthree and Frogglet are still out there, you can be proud of your creation.
Website: The Pokémon Factory
Interview conducted on August 12th 2023
Interview published on December 14th 2023