Vol. 2, Issue 16 - Interview with Universal Pokémon Network
An interview with Jaxel, the webmaster of a hugely popular Pokémon fan website called Universal Pokémon Network, which operated between 1999 - 2001. Plus, a round-up of the latest Pokémon news!
It’s time for more Johto Times! This week, in volume 2, issue 16, I am publishing an interview with the legendary Pokémon fan website Universal Pokémon Network (UPNetwork), which was active between 1999 and 2001. It was one of the most popular websites of its time, and I had the pleasure of speaking with its webmaster, Jaxel. We also have a recap of this week’s Pokémon news!
News
Niantic have announced their Rediscover GO campaign, which will include quality of life updates to the app. These include improvements to player avatar creation, changes to the game's visuals, and a new GO Snapshot feature. Kanto Pokémon will also be a focus during an event on April 22nd. Some of these features have already been trialled in certain parts of the world already, such as the United Kingdom.
I have seen the visual changes first hand for several weeks, and I like them. It’ll be great to see them fully rolled out across the world. Full details can be found on the Pokémon GO website on the source link below.
Sources: Pokémon GO, Serebii
A 36-year-old man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data. In Japan, the practice is banned, and the man could face up to five years in prison and/or a fine of up to 5 million yen! According to NHK News, the man allegedly took custom orders for rare Pokémon, and the data was sold for up to 13,000 yen through an online marketplace that sells video game assets and items. Full details in the source links below.
Regretfully, Nintendo have now shut down online play for all 3DS and Wii U titles as of April 8th, 2024. However, Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter continue to be functional at the time of writing. I hope you made plenty of great memories playing Pokémon on these consoles!
Source: Nintendo
Feature: Interview with Universal Pokémon Network
Universal Pokémon Network (UPNetwork) was a notable Pokémon fan website that began around May 1999 and lasted until around March 2001. It offered up-to-date Pokémon news, editorials, and information on the Pokémon anime, video games, and trading card game. It also provided hosting to several other Pokémon fan websites. Upon its closure, the Ultimate Pokémon Network, which is unaffiliated with the original UPNetwork, was founded as its replacement. I am pleased to be interviewing Jaxel, the creator of Universal Pokémon Network, to answer some questions about the website, its community, and his thoughts regarding Pokémon.
Jaxel, thank you for agreeing to this interview! Let’s begin with an introduction to you and your website.
Jaxel:
My name is Jason Axelrod, also known as "Jaxel". I created the Universal Pokémon Network back in the late 90s as a fan site for the Pokémon games and anime. We eventually became the most popular Pokémon website for its time before having to shut down due to the dot-com bubble burst. Since leaving the Pokémon community, I ran several fighting game communities, as well as tournaments and live streaming. Now I've retired from nearly all communities and simply livestream my personal gaming on Twitch and Kick where I discuss various pop-culture and political issues.
How did you first get introduced to Pokémon?
Jaxel:
I, like most people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, [was] watching anime; we just didn't know it. Shows like Robotech, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Samurai Pizza Cats, etc. were not billed as something foreign. For me, the first anime I watched knowing full well it was something different was Record of Lodoss War. After seeing Lodoss, I was hooked. I would go to Chinatown and pick up bootleg VHS tapes, just to see what was new.
We didn't have the internet streaming like we do today, so watching anime took a lot of effort and expense. Pokémon was the first anime to really hit the mainstream. So when it began airing, I had to watch it. This was my chance to watch anime without having to head to NYC. And from episode 1 in 1998, I was hooked. I largely credit it to Eric Stuart and Rachel Lillis who brought Team Rocket to life, becoming beloved fan favorites.
You created UPNetwork around May 1999. What encouraged you to open a website dedicated to Pokémon in the first place?
Jaxel:
UPNetwork was only the second website I had created. In previous years, I was a beta tester for Westwood Studios. They were working on the first MOBA game[, which was] called "Sole Survivor". At the time, I set up my first website, which was a Sole Survivor fansite, where I tracked tournaments and rankings we would do in the game. It was a simple website, being run on Geocities. When Pokémon started airing, I immediately wanted to set up a fansite for it, and I'm pretty sure UPNetwork was launched within 2 months of the first episode airing. It was probably on Geocities as well, I don't remember. The internet at the time was still the wild west, and everyone was scared of it, including Nintendo. So they would send cease and desist orders to every website which used any of their content. After a while, I received one of these C&D letters from Perkins Coie demanding I shut the site down.
Eventually some friends I had made during the Sole Survivor beta offered to help me relaunch UPNetwork on its own domain. So a month or two after shutting down, we relaunched with a completely redesigned website, with "fair use" in mind. We didn't use any official Nintendo artwork outside of the Pokedex, as I found a great artist known as "slimu" who drew all the pictures for the site. I made a point to create what would become known as a "splash page", outlining the four points of fair use in an effort to stave off any further problems from Nintendo. Thankfully Nintendo gave us no further aggravation, and the fair use splash page I had designed spread like wildfire in the proceeding years to various other websites.
The website quickly grew in popularity and became one of the most prominent Pokémon fan websites on the web. What contributed to its success?
Jaxel:
This is actually an easy one! The first was our clip archive. 1998 was before the era of online streaming; bandwidth was extremely expensive, so video was rare and hard to come by. Not to mention, no one had capture cards. What we did was set up a clip archive, where people could submit video clips from the show, and we would transcode them into the RM (RealMedia) format.
The second factor was our forums. There was no social media back then, so there weren't many places people could go to discuss their fandoms. There was no Reddit, no Discord, no Facebook, no Twitter, etc. We quickly became one of the biggest forums on the internet at the time; were we better than the rest? Probably not, but we were first in and best dressed, and that contributed a lot.
You hosted a number of different websites through UPNetwork, allowing for others to express their passion for the series. What were some of your favourites?
Jaxel:
The friends I had made from my Sole Survivor days were doing such a great job at running the servers that they eventually got hosting offers from other Pokémon websites. But they didn't want to host other Pokémon websites without my permission, for fears it would be intruding on existing territory. The compromise we came up with was to host them with the condition that there was a circular partnership between all the websites. It really was nothing more than link-sharing and advertising deals, but it turned UPNetwork into an actual... network. I honestly can't remember which websites we hosted and which we didn't. Was [The PokéMasters] one of them? I think the reason why we rejected hosting [Pojo] was because we already had a big TCG website in the network with TPM.
Your forum was an opportunity for your members to come together and discuss topics both connected and unconnected to Pokémon. It also offered websites hosted by UPNetwork their own board, where users of those communities could converse with one another. How would you describe your community?
Jaxel:
We were all young. It's not like today where many of the geeks you meet are in their 40s and 50s. What you have to remember is that 25 years ago, those old geeks today were once kids. That was us.
UPNetwork was one of four websites that were part of the Anti-Spammer Alliance, which included other popular Pokémon fan websites such as The PokéMasters, Bulbapedia, and Pokémon Abode. What can you tell us about this alliance and its specific aims?
Jaxel:
I don't remember a single thing about it. But I was a fan of "official" sounding names; hell, I made a website called "The Universal Pokémon Network". It's pretty cringey. So something called the "Anti-Spammer Alliance" isn't surprising. The internet being the wild west back then, spam would certainly have been a major issue. But I learned very quickly that I didn't want to be a moderator; I liked being an administrator. I liked to tinker, and make sure things were running smoothly, but moderating forums and a community? I never wanted to do that. So we had a large team of moderators making sure to keep the trolls at bay.
A message on the front page of the forum stated that old posts and accounts with no activity for 30 days were deleted. I personally found this an odd decision, given how it’s quite normal for people to leave and return to communities after long periods of time. What was your reason for implementing this rule in your community?
Jaxel:
At its peak, UPNetwork hit 5.4 million pageviews in a single day. We reached 1.5 million unique hits. Today, anyone can make a website for $3 a month. Back then, costs were prohibitive. Every page was more money that needed to be spent to keep it running. Even if no real person visited those pages, search engine spiders did. Search engines were exploding in popularity and the number of spiders trawling the internet was skyrocketing. So it was natural to reduce the number of pages that non-legitimate users would be pinging to keep the costs down. In fact, the real issue we had with UPNetwork was not spammers, it was bandwidth theft. As I stated before, one of the core draws of the website was our clip archives. Many new sites understood this, so they wanted to take advantage of those clips by direct linking to our clips from their own websites.
UPNetwork featured a wealth of information on the Pokémon series, including news on video games, trading cards, and other useful information that readers will have found helpful. What were some of your favourite pieces of content from the website?
Jaxel:
When you make a website, you don't really visit it yourself. If you made a website, and filled it with content, you already know what's on it. So your own personal needs to use the resources become diminished. So I spent the majority of my time on the forums, chatting with people. I was [a] geek in the 90s, before being a geek was cool. So I didn't have a lot of friends. The community became my friends and family.
Which other fan websites did you enjoy visiting during the time you were webmaster of UPNetwork and why?
Jaxel:
I always thought the two best Pokémon websites (besides UPNetwork) at the time were [Pojo] and Bulbagarden. [Pojo] was simply a fantastic resource for the TCG, and Bulbagarden I just greatly appreciated as a website designer. However, one of the reasons why I've always loved forums, and still semi-work on forums today, is because forums largely erase the need to visit other websites. If you put together a good group of friends with similar interests, they will curate your news for you.
Today Discord has largely erased forums from existence. If you think about it, how often do you view the front page of a website anymore? I don't. If one of my friends finds an interesting article, a piece of news, or some cool video... they will post it in our Discord chat. Even 25 years ago, I found myself rarely going to the front page of websites. AIM and ICQ were popular back then, and if something interesting was out there, a friend would let me know. Sure, this can lead to echo chambers, but the groups I spend my time with often stray outside of our in-group preferences just to laugh at the outside world.
Around March 2001, the Universal Pokémon Network shut down, leaving a rather large hole in the Pokémon fan community. What was the reason for the closure?
Jaxel:
I don't think people today will ever truly understand how expensive it was to run a website like UPNetwork back during the internet bubble. There was a lot of money going around back then, and because of that, the cost to do anything was also prohibitively expensive. When your website is in the top 10 most popular websites in all the internet, it takes the GDP of a small micro-nation to keep it running. When the internet bubble burst in 2000, the income required to keep UPNetwork running just wasn't there anymore. We did the best we could to keep it running for a few months, hoping that the internet economy would recover, but unfortunately it would take several years before any large websites would recover.
However, even I did not know the website would disappear the day it did. It was the hosts who decided that day to end it. I wish I was given more notice, but alas, what happened is what happened. They owned the domain name, so what they chose to do with it after that was up to them. I have no resentment for the way things happened; I may have run the website, but the work they did to keep it up and the amount of money they lost in the previous months holding out hope for a recovery was incalculable.
Do you have any cool Pokémon-related items from your early days that you still own?
Jaxel:
I wish I had kept more of my memorabilia from those days. But being a kid, coming into financial success, you don't know how to handle that. You throw money in the wind. By the 2008 recession, I had sold off pretty much everything I owned. There are only a few things I still retain; unfortunately none of the games, but I still have a few cards here and there, as well as some beanie babies. In fact, I still have some Neopets that were sent to me when they were trying to court us for an advertising deal.
A successor website called Ultimate Pokémon Network opened in 2002, which continues to operate to this day in 2024. Despite having no connection to this project, what are your feelings towards the community and how it has grown and developed over the years?
Jaxel:
Honestly? I was probably a bit mad at the time, of another website co-opting our name. But I was a kid, who didn't know better. I didn't appreciate the community at the time. I liked power and I liked being in charge. I still like power and I still like being in charge. But over the years, running communities for various video games, running tournaments for the FGC, I've grown to appreciate doing things for communities, expecting no compensation in return.
As for Pokémon? I was a high schooler, who was making more money than any of his teachers, off of a hobby. When the bubble burst, and the money disappeared, my interest in the hobby went with it. People will often say that if you can transition your hobby into a job, that's what you should do. And while that is sound advice, there are dangers involved. If the job disappears, and your interest in that hobby transitioned with that job, then the hobby disappears with it.
Let's talk about that a bit! It sounds like UPNetwork was generating a fair bit of income for you. What sort of numbers are we talking, and how was that made possible?
Jaxel:
It was all through advertising. We had advertising deals through IGN Snowball and a few other networks. If I can recall correctly, [we] were making about $24 CPM; and that's in 1999 currency. Even today, you're lucky to get 1/10th of that. That's how much money was flying around during the dot-com bubble.
Even with that kind of money flying around, the costs to run the website was so expensive that the majority of the income went directly to upkeep. Economics is not in a vacuum; if you're making a lot of money, you've got to spend a lot of money to do it. After all expenses were paid and done for, I profited about $150-$200 a day. Extremely tight margins if you do the math. So any bandwidth theft was dangerous.
So much has happened with the Pokémon brand since the closure of your website. At the time of interview, there are nine generations, with over 1000 Pokémon characters and forms. Pokémon has exploded in popularity and continues to be a global phenomenon. What have been your highlights of the series since those days?
Jaxel:
After UPNetwork went down, Gen 3 was released... and I did not like those games, so I have not touched a single thing Pokémon-related since then.
Looking back, what would you say were your proudest achievements while you were the webmaster of UPNetwork?
Jaxel:
Pure numbers. 5.4 million pageviews in a single day, 1.5 million uniques. Peaking at #6 on Alexa worldwide rankings.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to Johto Times, Jaxel! Before we end this interview, do you have any comments for our readers, or to the people who visited Universal Pokémon Network during the late 90s and early 2000s?
Jaxel:
For me, Pokémon is a largely forgotten time in life, but for many, it isn't. As long as they can continue to enjoy the properties they've grown up with, that's all that matters. If you can proselytise and spread the joy you once had to others, even better! I find the 90s to be the peak of the anime industry and often spend my time discussing the great anime and games from that era to the younger generations.
A big thanks to Jaxel for his insight into UPNetwork and an era of the Pokémon fan community. While he may have left Pokémon behind, we wish him luck with his future endeavours!
That’s all for this week! Be sure to share the Johto Times with your friends and loved ones, and help us reach even more Pokémon fans! We are still open to sharing your mailbag entries by visiting this link, and contacting us directly!