Vol. 2, Issue 17 - Interview with Nick Roberts (Pokémon World Magazine)
Johto Times interviews the former Editor of Pokémon World Magazine, an unofficial publication published in the United Kingdom between 2000 - 2015. Plus, a recap of the latest Pokémon news
It’s time for Vol. 2, issue 17 of the Johto Times newsletter. This week, I am delighted to be sharing an interview with Nick Roberts, who was the Editor of an unofficial Pokémon magazine called Pokémon World. Nick shares his thoughts on the magazine, its community, and why its name had to change. There’s also a recap of the latest Pokémon news and updates. Let’s get to it!
News
The Pokémon Card Lounge, a facility dedicated to the Pokémon Trading Card Game, will open its doors today, April 25th, 2024, at the Shibuya Tsutaya, a multi-storey entertainment hub located in Shibuya City, Tokyo.
Players will be welcome to play the Pokémon TCG at one of their many tables and in private rooms at a cost. If you're feeling hungry the lounge offers drinks and snacks, which are available for free after paying an entry fee. There's also a range of exclusive merchandise such as shirts, bags, journals, and more!
It sounds like a fun, safe way for people to enjoy the Pokémon TCG together. If you’re heading over there, be sure to let us know what you think!
Source: Shibuya Tsutaya, Siliconera
Free Comic Book Day, an annual event occurring the first Saturday in May, will be on May 4th, 2024, and this year Pokémon Adventures: Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire is one of the titles being given away. If you've ever had an interest in the long-running manga series, but haven't had the chance to check it out for yourself, this could be the perfect opportunity to get your hands on a copy for free! In addition to Pokémon, you can also grab copies of Far Cry: Cull the Herd and Street Fighter vs. Final Fight #1, among others.
You can check to see if you're located near a participating retailer by visiting this link, and typing in your postal or zip code.
Source: Free Comic Book Day
Feature: Interview with Nick Roberts (Pokémon World Magazine)
Pokémon World (later renamed Pocket World) was a monthly, unofficial Pokémon magazine published in the United Kingdom, which ran for 174 issues between 2000 and 2015. It provided news and information for Pokémon games, events, merchandise, and related products. It featured plenty of fan works, answered reader's questions, promoted fan websites, and much more! Today, I am thrilled to share our interview with Nick Roberts, the former Editor of the magazine who was involved in every single issue!
Hello, Nick. Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview! Can you please start by introducing yourself to our readers?
Nick:
Sure. Happy to be here. My name is Nick Roberts and in a past life I was writer, Editor and Editor in Chief of various video game magazines at various publishing companies. These days I work as Head of Studio of Amuzo Games, making fun mobile, web and Steam games!
Since the late 1980s you have worked for several publications in lead roles, across dozens of gaming-focused magazines based in the United Kingdom. One of the projects was Pokémon World Magazine, an unofficial publication that was published monthly from 2000 until 2015. How did you first get involved with it?
Nick:
I launched Pokémon World while working at Paragon Publishing. Actually, we launched a sister magazine around the same time – Digimon World – but as you can imagine Pokémon World was the one that succeeded! There was no magazine out there for Pokémon fans, and working on Nintendo magazines we were having lots of fun with Pokémon, so it made perfect sense to launch a dedicated magazine for the game and brand. Fun fact! We launched Pokémon World five years before The Pokémon Company even came to the UK!
As the Editor of Pokémon World, what were your responsibilities?
Nick:
We started out with a small team of freelancers with me as Editor in Chief, but it wasn’t long before I became a one man band on Pokémon World – writing, designing, creating the cover gifts. So I would say “everything!”. As I moved on to become Editor in Chief of gaming magazines like games™, Retro Gamer, X360 and Play, I didn’t have quite so much Pokémon World time, so we did expand the freelance side of things and get more involved with the Pokémon fan community.
Throughout the years, the magazine was published under different companies after they were sold and liquidated. Can you offer some insight into what exactly happened with Pokémon World’s ownership throughout those years?
Nick:
Yes, the turbulent magazine publishing years of the early 2000s. The thing to remember is it was only the best magazines that were continued when a new publishing company came along. Pokémon World was, at one time, the best-selling magazine for Paragon Publishing! Nearly 50,000 copies sold every month!
Beginning with Issue 125, the magazine changed its name from Pokémon World to Pocket World. What was the story behind the change?
Nick:
Arrrghh! Flashbacks! Well, remember I said that The Pokémon Company didn’t exist in the UK until 2005, but we were around from 2000? Well, after all those years working nicely with Nintendo, making a fun magazine that readers enjoyed and giving every Pokémon game massive promotion – once Pokémon Co. realised that the magazine existed, it wasn’t long before we didn’t exist any more. We ended up having to change the magazine name and make sure to include other brands in it, not just Pokémon. We considered “Monster World”, but as Pokémon was “Pocket Monsters” in Japan, with went with “Pocket World” – the boss at the time hoped that on a newsagent shelf where magazines were stacked together, you would still see the “P” and “W” letters and think it was the same mag! Yeah, that didn’t work for long…
The magazine provided the latest Pokémon news and information with coverage of events, products, and upcoming products. How did you source that information each month?
Nick:
I had my go-to websites and fan-sites that were a wealth of Pokémon knowledge. We combined this with the fact that we were a games magazine company and had a fantastic relationship with Nintendo – they were a good bunch of people. Every new Pokémon game came to us, with artwork and screenshots to promote it.
Pokémon World embraced the community, with fan-created content and dedicated sections including readers’ letters, artwork, photographs, and fan-made Pokémon cards. How important was this type of content for the magazine?
Nick:
Oh, absolutely essential! The reader content was always so much fun to sift though – we used to get 1,000s of “Design-A-Monster” entries every month. I kept a bulging postbag under my desk and did a lucky dip each issue!
Readers could send in their questions to Professor Yew, who would answer a variety of different questions related to Pokémon. What can you share about this character?
Nick:
Ha-ha. Well Professor Yew was actually invented by my brother Jem in the early days of the magazine as our version of Professor Oak – oak, yew… geddit? We used the character to be our boffin on everything Pokémon.
How did you make decisions on which content would be published in the magazine?
Nick:
I always went out of my way to make each issue a good mixed bag of stuff. I particularly loved anything from Japan, as they had so much more cool Pokémon stuff over there. I think that may be why Pokémon Co. didn’t like our magazine much. Official magazines are always a bit dull, doing as they are told, rather than a big fan celebration of a magazine, which we were creating with Pokémon World.
The magazine would regularly feature contributions from people outside the main team, and one of these people was Joe Merrick from Serebii.net, who runs one of the most notable Pokémon fan websites. How did these collaborations come together?
Nick:
Yeah, Joe and Serebii.net were like the Wikipedia of Pokémon. So much information crammed into that website. We started fact checking things on the website, and eventually offered for Joe to write some features for the magazine. There is nothing that man doesn’t know about Pokémon! Fun fact number two: Joe was also running Serebii.net from Bournemouth, and we were based in Bournemouth. For a time in the 2000s, Bournemouth was the centre of the Pokémon universe!
Magazines of this kind are frequently bundled with free gifts, and Pokémon World was no exception. How were these items usually chosen and sourced?
Nick:
By me! They say there are statues of me outside some Chinese factories, I put so much business their way. I was making 50,000 “somethings” every month, choosing the gifts, designing the gifts, sending the artwork to China, checking the UK safety regulations were being abided by, then tracking the slow container ships that would bring the gifts over to the UK. It took 3 months to get the gifts via sea! The trick was having them arrive in the same week as the magazines were printed. Then actual human beings would sit in a warehouse somewhere and bag the magazine and gifts together. The best gift I ever stuck on a magazine was a fully remote controlled car! I paid 30p per car!
Each issue was bundled with an additional booklet that included puzzles, stories, cheats, game guides, and other content related to Pokémon. Can you explain how the content of these additional books was decided upon?
Nick:
Well the go-to content was always an “A-Z Guide To”. Working in a games company there were plenty of freelance writers around who would be keen to write something Pokémon-y. Especially as I was paying good money for it.
Pokémon World also had its own website and community forums, which offered news, features, game showcases, and a place for readers to converse on the message board. What function did the website play in addition to the magazine?
Nick:
There was no real point in the website. Not with Serebii.net around! It was just one of those things that bosses sometimes do, “You’ve got to make a website… err… no you can’t have any more money to make it!”
How much did the creation of the website and forum impact sales of the magazine?
Nick:
I don’t think the website and forum affected sales of the magazine at all. Magazines like Pokémon World live or die on their covers, their gifts and their position on newsagent shelves.
The website also featured the Pokémon World Face-Off, where readers would be shown two random Pokémon, and would pick which they wanted to win. According to a Press Release from Imagine Publishing in April 2009, it stated that it had received three million battles in four months! What are your thoughts on its success?
Nick:
Yeah, that was amazing when those numbers came in. Obviously readers thought it was a fun feature and spread the word!
How would you describe the Pokémon World Community?
Nick:
It was mainly kids from what I remember, and quite young ones too. We would regularly go along to the Pokémon Trading Card Game events and it was great to see the enthusiasm that kids had for Pokémon. We would provide events with overstocks of magazines to give away as prizes.
What were some of your favourite issues?
Nick:
To be perfectly honest they all exist as one yellow-coloured blur to me. My boss at the time wanted Pikachu on the cover of EVERY issue, as Pikachu issues always sold more! I tried to fight that instruction as often as I could, but you couldn’t argue with the numbers! I am very proud of the magazine, and the sales we achieved with it, but I couldn’t pick out one issue as a favourite. It’s like asking which is your favourite child!
The magazine ceased publication in October 2015 after fifteen years. What reason(s) led to it ending?
Nick:
Killed by powerful forces out of our control! That change to “Pocket World” destroyed our sales – 50,000 copies sold every month went down to 10,000. We were forced to cover other games in the magazine like Moshi Monsters, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Digimon, but the readers only wanted Pokémon, and loved the content we had been making. By then there was an Official Pokémon Magazine, but official magazines are always just a voice for the brand, and not a passionate fan magazine. They also seem to cater for the youngest fans only with dot-to-dots and cake pop recipes! Not the cool Pokémon content we had been providing.
What projects were you involved in after Pokémon World?
Nick:
I left magazine publishing in 2014 to work in game development. I discovered a company called Amuzo Games in Bournemouth where I live. I had actually reviewed some of their games in Pocket World magazine as Amuzo did lots of LEGO games. Luckily I gave LEGO Chima: Speedorz a good review, and they gave me a job! I have now produced lots of games for LEGO, Playmobil, Netflix and most recently launched Dobble Go! for iOS and Android – bringing the family card game to life digitally!
The landscape for video game magazines is very different in 2024, and there are far fewer magazines on the shelves than there used to be. As someone who worked in this industry for a significant time, what are your feelings on the decline of print media?
Nick:
Video killed the radio star, then the internet killed print magazines. Next it’s going to be free-to-play mobile games killed the games industry. The problem these days is that consumers have got used to content being free. You used to have to buy your favourite magazine each month – now you can swipe through social media or websites on your phone for free, as long as you view enough ads.
Even a small mobile game will cost around £100,000 to make, yet players expect to download it for free, and we get complaints like, “I was enjoying your game, but then it asked me to buy some coins to continue, so I deleted it!” Wow. So how are we supposed to pay everyone and keep the lights on? Personally I hate advertising in games, and long for a time where we return to paying just a few pounds for a quality game, and enjoy it! Brings me full circle to spending my pocket money on £1.99 budget games for the ZX Spectrum!
Looking back, what are your highlights of working on Pokémon World and with your team?
Nick:
A big highlight for me was being invited to the launch of Pokémon Black and White with my boy Bennett, he must only have been about 6 at the time, and I took him to Leicester Square in London one night for him to meet Pikachu! Being able to do that for my boy, and have the photos to look back on together makes it all worthwhile! I recently met Pikachu again at the Toy Fair in London… he didn’t remember meeting us at all!
Nick, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions! I have a lot of great memories of reading the magazine growing up (issues 17-43), and I discovered lots of great Pokémon fan websites thanks to them being mentioned in the magazine. I was also thankful to have my letter published at one point!
Before we end this interview, do you have any closing comments you would like to make to readers and subscribers of Pokémon World and Pocket World?
Nick:
Just remember that there is no such thing as “free” content. Support those magazines, websites, fanzines, podcasts, games that you love, as there is someone behind it that still needs to pay their bills.
Once again, a huge thanks to Nick for sparing some time to chat with me about a magazine that was a big part of lots of children’s lives across the United Kingdom for around fourteen years!
That’s another issue all wrapped up! 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, so drop us a line by visiting this link to contact us directly!
I'll need to add the Pokémon Card Lounge on my list of places to go to if I ever get to go to Japan. On the list is, of course, the Nihonbashi Pokémon Center.