Vol. 2, Issue 14 - Interview with Marills World
I interview Dom from Marills World, an old Pokémon fan website that existed between 2001 and 2005. Plus, the very latest Pokémon news and updates!
Welcome to issue 14 of the Johto Times! This week, we are sharing an interview with a small classic website called Marills World, a website I personally visited when I was a teenager! I had the pleasure of speaking with Dom, its webmaster, about his memories of the website and his love of Pokémon. We’ve also got the latest Pokémon news, which includes a very important announcement relating to the future of online connectivity with Pokémon on 3DS, so don’t miss out!
News
On April 8th, 2024, at 16:00 PDT, online services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software will cease operation permanently. For Pokémon fans, it marks the end of an era, as games such as Pokémon X & Y, Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, Sun & Moon, and Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon will no longer allow players to engage in online battling, trading, or any other services that require an internet connection. Online play for Pokkén Tournament on Wii U will also be impacted by this.
As we mentioned last week, this won’t immediately affect the use of Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter; however, Nintendo have stated that support for these “may also end at some point in the future” after this date. Full details can be found in the source link below.
Source: Nintendo
Pokémon got behind the April Fools' Day shenanigans at the start of this month, with a Pokémon Sleep World Champions Tournament video for Pokémon Sleep. The nearly four minute trailer showed an arena packed with fans as contestants attempt various sleep styles and attempt to become Pokémon Sleep Champions. The humorous video serves as an advertisement for the game, but it was great fun to watch. A link to it can be found in the source below.
Niantic also got on board with their own event titled “An Excellent Opportunity”, where Nice and Great throws counted as Excellent throws for the day.
Feature: Interview with Marills World
Marills World was a Pokémon fan website which featured news and information relating to the Pokémon franchise. It ran for almost four and a half years, between January 2001 and May 2005. I had the pleasure of interviewing Dom, the owner of the website, to learn more about his time working on it.
I’m thankful to be conducting this interview for Johto Times with you, Dom! Could you please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us about your old Pokémon fan website, Marills World?
Dom:
Marills World was primarily a news site I originally set up on Geocities in the early 2000s. (It started out as Marrils World [sic] because the first time Marill was announced, the spelling ‘Marril’ was introduced, and then it was changed to Marill soon after.) I mainly did short news updates and rumours about upcoming games and movie releases, taken from all over the internet. I started putting up reviews of the Pokémon games, movies and various checklists, so the site also ended up being a kind of archive of Pokémon ‘stuff’ as well.
It got quite a few visitors back in the day, maybe a thousand or so a month and I kept hitting the Geocities bandwidth limit as well as the storage limit for files, so decided to upgrade to a .com. That must have been in 2002 or 2003. I remember adding Marills World to various ‘Top Pokémon Sites’ lists, which used to track how many visitors a site got, and ended up quite high in a few of those rankings. I even ended up adding an early iteration of Google Ads, and probably made $100 over the course of a year – not too bad! I really enjoyed visiting the forums of other Pokémon fan sites – there were dozens of other similar sites at the time – so [I] decided to add a forum to Marills World as well and that drew together a small group of regular visitors. Eventually, however, I shut the site down in 2005 due to a waning interest and motivation. Thankfully parts of the site were archived by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine so you can still see what the site was like.
Your website went live on January 31st, 2001, and was originally on Geocities before moving to its own host. What encouraged you to create the website in the first place?
Dom:
That’s a long time ago! This was still the period when most people connected to the internet using 56k dial-up, and broadband was slowly becoming available. There were loads of fan sites, usually on Geocities or similar platforms, and they were people’s creative outlets for their interest in various things, including Pokémon. They generally included original drawings, fanfiction and so on, and loads of people had a go at creating a page, if not a full site. If you’ve not seen what old Geocities sites look like, definitely google ‘Geocities archive’ and there’s loads of examples – they are pretty unique things! I was also inspired by news sites like Eyes On Final Fantasy. I wanted to do something similar for Pokémon, though it never grew to be as good or as large as that.
The official Pokémon site had almost nothing on it, and certainly didn’t have any community element. I can’t remember what exactly the first iteration of Marills World had exactly; definitely some news items, and then some reviews of the games and movies. In any case, for me, setting up a site meant I could also be part of a community of like-minded people with fan sites. Many fan sites had ‘affiliates’ they linked to, usually through a small hyperlinked button, and you got to know the people that ran those other sites.
The mascot for the website is obviously Marill. The website even had a shrine dedicated to it, with facts and information about the Aqua Mouse Pokémon. Can you tell us why it was clearly so special to you?
Dom:
By the time I set up Marills World, the first generation Pokémon games had been out for a year or so in the UK. Marill and Togepi were the first of the second generation Pokémon to be revealed in the anime and the mini movie that came with Pokémon: The First Movie. Marill was really interesting to me for that reason initially, and I was interested in what it would evolve into (or from) and what other Pokémon were going to follow with the second generation. I guess for a fan/news site having the latest Pokémon represent the site showed that I had current, up-to-date content! Marill’s pretty cute too!
In addition to providing the latest news, you had sections dedicated to Pokémon video games, the anime, movies, manga, a trading card checklist, and some cool web games such as Marills Typing Tutor and a Skating Pikachu game. What were some of your favourite pieces of content?
Dom:
I don’t even remember that skating game! I do remember the Typing Tutor, which was repurposed from a free typing game somewhere on the internet. I remember at least a couple of people saying they learned to type faster using that! But I think writing up the news items was the most enjoyable. I used to scour a range of Pokémon websites and forums for rumours about what was in development, what had launched in Japan and what might start getting translated into English. It was really exciting to keep tabs on that stuff, and to pass on that news to my readers as well.
One cool feature from your website was the Guest Map, where readers could pin their location to show where they were from and show their appreciation for the website. Based on my research, Marills World had at least 93 entries by April 2003 across dozens of different countries. What was it like to know that your website had global reach by so many fans?
Dom:
That was awesome. I loved checking where people had come from. Lots of sites had guest books so you could leave your mark. It was nice knowing people had visited and seen what I had put countless hours into creating and running. It’s sad to know those marks people made were so ephemeral – many of those guestbooks and the “I was here” disappeared years ago – but also cool to know that there is some archive of them on sites like the Internet Archive.
Marills World had a small yet cosy forum community, with 144 members as of March 2005, towards the end of its life. How would you describe your community from back then?
Dom:
It was definitely a small community; I think of those 144 only a dozen or so people were especially active on the Marills World forum, and most also frequented other forums. I recall a handful of sites had similarly sized forums. But it was a place to chat with friends, not just about Pokémon but about music, other games, and life. I really think some of these fansite forums could be likened to what we see on Discord today – semi-closed communities of people drawn together around some particular interest. It was [a] place to get to know some new people and kill some time in the evenings and weekends! I also chatted with a few people on Yahoo and MSN Messenger outside the forums.
What was it like for you as a fan growing up with Pokémon in the late 90s and early 2000s?
Dom:
Most of my friends got the first Pokémon game on the Game Boy and found it fun, but not many people I knew really got into the anime, movies and trading card game beyond that. I was 13 when the first game came out, and was probably considered slightly too old to like Pokémon, which, although an absolute stone-cold classic RPG, was probably also thought to be too cutesy for a teenager to be a fan of beyond the game. As a result, most of my interactions around Pokémon came online rather than ‘in real life’. I think these days being a fan of the Pokémon games, and anime-related titles in general, is way more mainstream for teenagers and adults, and isn’t just kids.
For me, being a Pokémon fan meant waiting for Saturday morning when the latest episode of the anime came on SMTV and recording it to VHS so you could watch it again later. It meant going into town at the weekend to try and pick up some Pokémon cards to complete my collections from the local hobby shop, which mainly did Magic the Gathering cards, and to see what new Pokémon merchandise Game, WH Smith and Tesco had in stock (usually not a lot). It also meant trawling loads of fun fan sites for news and little bits of information. You had to work to get the information!
Oh no, now I’ve got visions of SMTV Live’s Ant & Dec’s Poké Rap with their Pikachu jumpers that they would perform before every episode… I did the exact same thing, running downstairs to record it on VHS! I can also relate with gathering up information from other websites for my own fan website back then. Was that a challenge for you?
Dom:
Although there wasn’t so much information around, in a way it was easier to find trustworthy news because there weren’t so many unfounded rumours circulating, like there are on Twitter today (though obviously there was a good handful). I had a list of websites and forums. I had a look for news and passed on the credible sounding stuff to my readers. The official Nintendo and Pokémon websites had barely any information so everything was second hand!
If you’re anything like me, you probably collected plenty of awesome Pokémon items throughout your childhood! Did you keep hold of anything that meant something to you?
Dom:
One thing that blows my mind is that loads of people threw away Gameboy game boxes. I’m really happy I kept hold of all the games and their original cases, so these are certainly some of my favourite treasures! I’ve also kept hold of the original trading card game sets. My brother and I completed the first three sets of trading cards, and they are pretty much in mint condition except for the odd card. We’re not planning on getting rid of those any time soon, and are definitely heirloom things now. We need to get them properly cased up.
One thing I really wish I had kept hold of was the Pokémon Center Magical Clock, which I got when I was lucky enough to visit the Pokémon Center in New York before it became [Nintendo World]. That was a limited edition wall clock that played Pokémon music and did some mechanical things on the hour. There’s a few videos of it on YouTube, and [it] is pretty rare. In fact, it turns out that thing is worth $1000s these days, and I sold the one I had for some extra cash in the late 2000s. Oops!
I can't believe what you're telling me! You SOLD the Pokémon Center Magical Clock? I wanted one of those so badly! I hope it was worth it…
Dom:
Err. No. Probably enough to cover a couple of weeks’ rent. Really regret that! I hope whoever bought it kept it in good condition!
Unfortunately, all good things eventually come to an end. The last known post from Marills World was on May 11th, 2005, almost four and a half years after it first came online. Can you tell us what happened?
Dom:
I was finishing my A-Levels and had basically run out of steam with it. My interests had moved into listening to music and playing other video games, and it became more of a chore to run the site. It also wasn’t especially cheap to run a .com, so decided to shut down the website.
It’s incredible to think that the website closed its doors almost twenty years ago! At the time of the interview, we are in January 2024. What have you been up to since then?
Dom:
Yeah, that’s crazy. I can still remember loading up Pokémon Blue for the first time in October 1999 and hearing the title screen music! I can also vividly remember the Geocities content management interface. It seems like yesterday. Not to give you my life story, but since then I’ve been to university, got a PhD in archaeology, and I have worked in publishing and website management, got married, had a baby - the general life stuff! I still play lots of video games.
Do you still hold an interest for Pokémon?
Dom:
I’m still very fond of the original Pokémon games and anime. I rewatched some of the original anime series a few years ago, and I played Pokémon Go, and then played Pokémon Sword and Shield when they came out (after having a break since Pokémon Sapphire!) and I was surprised to see that nothing’s really changed. I enjoyed the experience and completed the Pokédex but I think my gaming interest has moved on a bit. I prefer action RPGs these days, and the magic of connecting Game Boys with a link cable and trading/battling has been lost. Having said that, I’m keen to introduce my daughter to the games and anime when she’s old enough. Pokémon is more nostalgic for me than a current interest, sadly; I haven’t kept up with the anime or trading card games.
Dom, it has been a pleasure to interview you for Johto Times! I used to visit your website regularly for news when I was younger, and was even an affiliate back then! I really enjoyed what you created, and I thank you for giving an old fan like me an opportunity to publish your thoughts! Do you have any final comments you would like to make to our readers, and anyone else who may have visited Marills World in the past?
Dom:
It's really nice to know that people remember the website. I also remember some of the other sites around at the time, like the PokéCommunity and Serebii.net (which I see is still going!), PokéAmph, Shining Misdreavus, Team Rocket 47, Pokémon Digimon United, and others. That era of fan websites, seen with not just Pokémon, but other franchises too, is such a unique and weird part of internet history, and it is really great that you are documenting it here. The websites were so important, not just as an early form of internet creativity (those animated gifs!), but also represented flourishing online communities. Thanks for interviewing me!
It's always great to look back and remember the communities we used to visit, and out of the smaller websites, Marills World was one of the ones I would used most frequently. It was so great to speak to Dom again after all these years and set this up. Thanks again Dom, and thank you for all the great memories Marills World brought me!
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