Vol. 2, Issue 20 - Interview with Joey & Jolty's Home
I interview Joey & Jolty's Home, a Pokémon fan website from 2003 that was used as a creative outlet, with user-submitted fan art, fanfics, and other resources. Plus a recap of the latest Pokémon news
Welcome to issue 20 of the Johto Times newsletter! Today, I am very happy to share an interview with an old Pokémon fan website called Joey & Jolty’s Home, which originally opened in 2003. As usual, we also have a recap of the latest Pokémon news!
On a side note, I am over the Mt. Moon to welcome the surge of new subscribers who joined us within the past couple of weeks! Thank you for checking out our newsletter and I hope you enjoy what Johto Times produces! Also, to those who have been subscribed to us for a while already, thank you for your dedication, as well as your kind words and feedback. They really brighten up my day!
News
I’m sad to report that Rachael Lillis, the original English dubbing artist for Misty and Jessie, is currently battling breast cancer. She has been receiving support at a nursing home in Los Angeles since late January, and the cancer has spread to her spine, causing her difficulty to walk. Her sister is currently organising a fundraiser for a caregiver, so she can receive support from home. Due to the generosity of fans, the fundraiser has already reached over $44,000 at the time of writing, way above its initial $20,000 target.
On behalf of the Johto Times team, we wish Rachael well in her recovery.
Source: GoFundMe
The Pokémon Company have announced that The Pokemon Center Online Store will be coming to Australia & New Zealand! While no specific release date has been confirmed at the time of writing, the online store will soft launch soon, with an official release shortly thereafter.
Source: Pokémon
Since September 2023, a song and art collaboration project between Pokémon and Hatsune Miku called Project Voltage has released a number of original songs. It has now been confirmed that all twenty-one tracks will be available on a new album, releasing in Japan on November 13th, 2024. It will have two discs, and will be sold for ¥7,700. It’s great to see collaborative projects like these, and hopefully we will see even more of them in the future!
Source: Project Voltage
Popular retailer GameStop will be selling graded Pokémon cards from next week in select stores in the United States. This is according to Pokémon TCG fan site PokéBeach, which goes on to confirm that GameStop will initially accept cards from PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) between grades 8-10, with a value of less than $500. The company will also sell $1 holo cards and reverse holos. It will be interesting to see the reception of this new business venture from GameStop.
Source: PokéBeach
Two new Pokémon Scarlet & Violet distributions have also been announced! You can currently obtain a Gyarados based on the one used in last year's Singapore Championships by using the code GYARAD0S2023SG. It will be available until June 30th, 2024. The second distribution is a Quaxly, with a code being given out during the episode of PokéDoko, a variety show set to air on May 19th, 2024. I will attempt to share this code in the next Johto Times if I am able!
Source: Serebii
Feature: Interview with Joey & Jolty’s Home
Joey & Jolty’s Home was a Pokémon fan website that opened on May 17th, 2003. It was run by Jolty, who used the website to express his interest in the series and as a creative outlet for his characters and art. During its active years, it featured a message board, Oekaki, a collection of user-submitted fan art and fanfics, along with the usual dedicated Pokémon pages and resources. I am delighted to be interviewing Jolty to discuss the website and its history.
It’s great to speak to you, Jolty! Can you please introduce yourself and your website to our readers?
Jolty:
Hi! My name is Jolty – it’s not a name I go by often these days but as far as I am concerned it is still one of my names. I’m now 32 years old, originally from England but have lived in the USA for the past five and a half years. When I was 11 I decided to make my own Pokémon website named Joey and Jolty’s Home; Joey and Jolty being two Jolteon characters I made up to be mascots (along with Azy the Azumarill). It was one of the typical Pokémon fansites from back in the day, though with more focus on “fun stuff” and less on information.
Joey & Jolty’s Home first opened in May 2003. What was the inspiration behind you starting the website?
Jolty:
I had picked up Pokémon World magazine from WHSmiths one day (pretty sure it was issue 10, there was a Marill on the cover) and found a link to a website called Mew’s Hangout in it. I visited Mew’s Hangout and was immensely delighted by this really cool website made by a real regular Pokémon fan! And from there I visited all of their affiliates too (notably the Cave of Dragonflies, or Butterfree’s Pokémon Site as it was known then) and decided I really wanted to make a cool Pokémon website too. My mum had recently made websites for her cats and dogs, and she let me use some space on one of those to make my own site and eventually helped me get my own domain name.
Your website had a wide range of content that built up throughout the years, with sections of the site dedicated to fan works, game guides, quizzes, fan clubs, and downloadable resources, to name a few. What were some of your favourite pieces of content?
Jolty:
Azy da Sykik (Psychic) was very fun to make, too bad I didn’t know how to make a proper “generate one of many different text strings” type of thing. It was basically like click anywhere on this image to get a fortune, and all of said fortunes were just very silly things that were my brand of humour. As far as I know it was pretty unique to JJH. I also really liked the variety
of What ___ Are You quizzes, which I have to thank Dragonfree for because she sent me the basic code for those waaaaaay back when.
There isn’t much data available regarding site traffic, but your website did state that in February 2006, almost three years after its original launch, it had received over 200,000 hits! For a smaller website, that must have been quite impressive. What do you think the website appealed to so many people?
Jolty:
I tried to access the hit counter recently but I found out that it reset at some point so I guess I’ll never truly know how many visitors it had in total. But yes I was ecstatic to get that many hits!! Even just 100,000! I’m not sure why so many people liked it haha, if I had to guess it’d be because it was a lot more “informal” than your average fansite? Like pretty obvious that this was another kid doing everything. And maybe that just vibed with all the other kids.
Like many Pokémon fan websites, Joey & Jolty’s Home had its own forum community, with over 500 registered members and over 121,000 posts by September 2007, which was the last searchable point we could find. How would you describe your community?
Jolty:
The forums were never really a big community, we had periods of high activity every now and then until around 2007, after which it basically became a hangout for myself and a small selection of people. We ended up as best friends forever and I still regularly talk to most of them in a Discord server we have. After the forum became just us we basically had one giant thread at a time where we’d just talk about anything and everything until we hit the post limit (I don’t remember the exact number that was, I think it was 80-90 thousand something).
I’m actually really sad that the host, Invisionfree, was bought out and then shut down because that’s just so much of my childhood kind of lost to the void. Between us all we have a lot of screencaps of things though so it’s not all gone. The Cave of Dragonflies forum was the big forum I knew of, I was very active there for many years.
I personally recall your website getting mentioned in the unofficial Pokémon World magazine in issue 34, and that’s how I originally found your website! What was it like to know your little website was mentioned in a publication that was being read by people all across the United Kingdom, and beyond?
Jolty:
I sent a lot of stuff to them over the years. Several people on the forum told me they found it through Pokémon World too! It’s wild to think that friendships I’ve had for almost 20 years are because of that little magazine. And that so many readers actually decided to type www.joeyandjolty.co.uk into their browsers to look at my site. I think me sending that one particular letter in was one of those life changing moments everyone has a few times in their lives, JJH would not have grown as much as it did if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met a lot of my friends, etc etc. It’s a lot to think about, I think the word that best describes the feeling for it is “wow”.
On February 15th, 2007, you started a webcomic for Joey & Jolty’s Home called Starguys, which you drew in Microsoft Paint. Can you please introduce the comic, and tell us about its story and characters?
Jolty:
Oh my god Star Guys. It was a comic about 9 Pokémon named after the planets that all lived in the same house and shenanigans happened. They were also all differently coloured to how their species usually are – not shinies, just obnoxious default MS Paint colours. And they all had a sun pattern on their head. Like Teddiursa’s crescent moon, just a sun instead. I actually originally made sprites of all of these because Dragonfree made a sprite edit of a Teddiursa with a star instead of the crescent haha.
The comic itself was very 15-year-old humour, and probably close to what would happen if a 15-year-old wrote a sitcom. One long-suffering “normal” character (Mars the Houndour), a bunch of wackjobs that are always his foil (Earth the Mudkip, Jupiter the Gligar, Saturn the Cubone, Ana/Uranus the Larvitar), characters that were slightly less wackjobs with some sort of gimmick (Mercury the Teddiursa and her coffee addiction, Venus the Chikorita and her Secret Stash™, Pluto the Skitty who played guitar and occasionally did a Musical Episode, Neptune the Spheal who as with all Spheals had no legs). A lot of it was very dumb and juvenile but SOME of the humour still holds up I think. The art does not. The art never held up haha. Fun fact these characters all exist as minor characters, as humans now, in my universe for my current characters – Trashland. This was meant to be a long webcomic but life circumstances have prevented it from happening.
September 5th, 2008, was the last time Joey & Jolty’s Home had a content update, and despite some posts throughout the years to highlight anniversaries, the site never received any further activity. What was the reason for this?
Jolty:
I think I ran out of steam to focus on multiple things at once. I was still drawing Star Guys then and I put all my energy into that. This was also when school and real life in general started to get “““serious””” for 16 year olds so that no doubt also contributed to it. It’s a shame I could only keep JJH going consistently for like five years but what can you do.
We grew up with so many websites like Joey & Jolty’s Home, created by fans with enthusiasm for the series, each doing their own thing. What were some of your favourites that you used to visit growing up?
Jolty:
As I’ve said previously, Mew’s Hangout and The Cave of Dragonflies were the big ones for me. Other ones I remember fondly were Mewtwofan’s Pokémon Page, Salazard’s Den, Pichu’s World, and Mewstar Island. For Pokémon itself, the first I’d ever seen of it was when I was at my next door neighbour’s house in 1999 and an episode of the anime was on TV [The Water Flowers of Cerulean City] where Ash gets the Cascade badge. We got sucked right into it and then one of our other friends got a Game Boy with Yellow version – which I borrowed for weeks on end until I got my own Game Boy haha.
Pokémon obviously meant a lot to you in your childhood, so I am keen to hear more about how you first got interested in the series! What are your earliest memories of it?
Jolty:
I was the perfect age for The Pokémon Craze to get me. Also, as an autistic person, the Pokémon games just happen to very much vibe with how my autism works. Collecting things and going for completion etc. are how I do games. I have played every single mainline Pokémon game on release and despite the era we are in of games getting rushed out so the CEOs get more money faster, I will probably keep doing this.
What Pokémon related items and merchandise have you held onto that mean something to you?
Jolty:
I am not one to throw things out like ever, a lot of my stuff is in storage right now but some things I have out are this Nidorino figure that for a while I took everywhere with me (I found him in a B&M store), the one surviving Game Boy game era box I have for Emerald, a VERY tattered Crystal guidebook that I know I have but couldn’t find to get a picture of… also look at this lamp my wife made for me that has a bunch of Pokémon I’ve used in the games over the years!! There is a Jolty the Jolteon on there who may actually predate the Jolty character of JJH.
At the time of this interview, we are now in the ninth generation of Pokémon. Several titles have been released since Joey & Jolty Home first began, and there are over 1000 Pokémon! I am curious to know what your thoughts on the series have been in recent years, and whether you’re still interested in Pokémon!
Jolty:
Oops I accidentally also half answered this one already. As I said, I’ve played every mainline Pokémon game on release, so I’m in it for life at this point. It is a huge bummer that the most recent games have been crunched so hard to be pushed out every single year. I'm particularly disappointed with Sword and Shield because it’s the region that’s based on the UK but it is straight up unfinished. The fact that Legends Z-A is NOT being released the same year it was announced is a good sign though, maybe Game Freak and Nintendo etc. are finally listening?
Also in my opinion, gen 5 was the best generation of games. Nothing has hit quite the same since then, though truly I have enjoyed every Pokémon game I’ve played. Also some of my favourite Pokémon are: Teddiursa, Ursaluna, Greninja, Gligar, both kinds of Sandshrew, Numel, Azumarill, Clauncher, Cubone, and Gastrodon.
Looking back, what are your thoughts on Joey & Jolty’s Home, and what does the future hold for the website and the projects that came from it, such as the comic?
Jolty:
Well I doubt it will ever get updated again, but I am leaving it up so people can visit it. Same with Star Guys. If I ever did decide to do more with either of them then that’d be cool, but I have too much going on in my life to really give it too much thought. Also they’re very much projects of my childhood, so if I did ever get back to them they’d have to be significantly
different. We’re all embarrassed by our younger selves but to be honest I wouldn’t change much about JJH if anything. I’m glad it was what it was and I’m glad people can look back on it fondly.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, Jolty! Do you have any final words you’d like to add for our readers, and for anyone who may have visited Joey & Jolty’s Home back in the day?
Jolty:
Thank you for having me!!! If anyone is curious about whether any site like JJH still exists, my friend Blu has a site very much in that category. He doesn’t get to update much but he has some cool and unique and super interesting content on there.
For anyone who visited Joey and Jolty’s Home: hi and thank you I appreciate you all so much!!!!
It was great to speak to Jolty about this little community that meant so much to him. We wish him all the very best of luck in the future, and thank him for creating Joey & Jolty’s Home!
That wraps up another issue of the Johto Times! Be sure to share our newsletter with your friends and loved ones, and help us reach even more Pokémon fans. For Discord users, you’re welcome to join our server for the latest notifications from our project. We are still open to sharing your mailbag entries, so if you have anything you would like to share with us, drop us a line by visiting this link to contact us directly!
im so happy to see joey and jolty on this! one of my favorite - if not MY FAVORITE - pokemon fansite back in the 2000s. it's great to see that we both ended up transitioning in the past decade or two. there are a few things on j&j i even pay a half-homage to on my own website. thank you for writing this interview up!