Vol. 2, Issue 22 - Interview with The Pokémon Tower
An interview with Jolt Master of The Pokémon Tower, a website which began in December 1998, and continues to host a huge collection of Pokémon fan works. Plus, a recap of the latest Pokémon news
It’s time for Vol. 2, issue 22 of the Johto Times newsletter! This week I am happy to share an interview with The Pokémon Tower, a huge collection of fanworks which includes stories, fanart, and fanvids. It opened in December 1998, making it one of the oldest surviving websites dedicated to fan media. As always, there's also a recap of the latest Pokémon news!
As I mentioned in the last issue, I am hoping to bring back our mailbag in the near future, and you are welcome to contribute! If you have a short story, fan art, some Pokémon questions, photographs from your collection, or precious Pokémon memories, contact details can be found by visiting this page.
News
The next season of Pokémon GO has been announced! Shared Skies will begin on June 1st and run until September 3rd, 2024, featuring Ultra Beasts and Mega Rayquaza. Niantic have also revealed information on this season's Monthly Timed Research, PokéStop Showcases, and Community Days. Research Breakthroughs will introduce shiny Jangmo-o for the first time in Pokémon GO. Further information can be found on the official Pokémon GO website.
The name of the season was announced during the LA Regionals live stream last Saturday, May 28th. During that stream, it was announced that new moves and move changes to 25 Pokémon, including Salamence and Ursaluna, would be coming during Shared Skies. The move changes will go live on June 3rd, 2024.
Source: Pokémon GO, Pokémon YouTube Channel
The FBI have announced that two men have been charged with a fraudulent scheme to defraud buyers and marketplaces to purchase sports and Pokémon trading cards at inflated and false prices. They amassed over $2 million in fraudulent and attempted sales from the year 2022 until around May 2024. The pair are alleged to have made fake slabs and attempted to sell the cards for more than they are worth. If convicted, both men face up to twenty years in prison.
PSA issued a statement via Twitter to confirm that their Brand Protection team worked with the FBI to build a case to charge the two men, stating that protecting collectors from fraud is a top priority and an important step forward for the hobby.
Source: Department of Justice, PSA
Feature: Interview with The Pokémon Tower
The Pokémon Tower (The Pokemon Tower) is a library of Pokémon fanfiction, fanart and fanvids. It was originally created on December 26, 1998 on VirtualAvenue, a free hosting service, before moving to its own domain on January 2nd, 2002, where it remains to this day. The website hosts a significant amount of content dating back to the very beginning of Pokémon’s Western release, offering fans a platform to express their creativity and passion.
At its peak, The Pokémon Tower would average around 650-725 hits per day, and on December 20th, 2007, the website reached one million lifetime hits! Since around April 2000, the website has been run by Jolt Master, who I am delighted to have interviewed to discuss the history of the website and its vast library of content.
Thank you for agreeing to this interview with me, Jolt Master! Could you please begin by introducing yourself and your website to our readers?
Jolt Master:
Of course! I'm delighted you reached out to me! Okay, I am The Jolt Master and I am the webmaster of The Pokémon Tower.
Despite running The Pokémon Tower for almost 25 years at this point, you weren’t its original owner! Apparently, the website was created on December 26th, 1998 by an individual who went under the name of Satoshi. How did you come to take ownership of the website from its original creator?
Jolt Master:
That is true and...wow, 25 years...yeeesh, that's a long time! But you're right. It started with someone who called himself Satoshi, who created the site, which was originally called The Pokémon Tower Library. I had written a fanfic of my own and wanted a place to post it and found Satoshi's site. After a few months of being there, he had managed to accrue about 100+ authors, but had decided that he no longer wanted to run the site. I saw an opportunity to take it over as I really liked the site, so I reached out to him and asked if I could run The Pokémon Tower Library. He agreed to it, provided me with the credentials, and boom! I was large and in charge!
The Pokémon Tower holds a significant amount of Pokémon fanfiction, submitted by fans between 1998 and 2012. Tell me a bit about the process you went through for obtaining, accepting and curating a collection of creative works for other people to enjoy!
Jolt Master:
A lot of man-hours, that's for sure! I will say that I never really actively sought out content for The Pokémon Tower; it always came to me. Visitors loved to submit their work and my inbox would certainly attest to that, but yeah, I never really had to seek out stories or artwork; they were happy to bring it to me to put it all on display at The Pokémon Tower.
I can also say that pretty much anything that was submitted would get posted. I had to keep in mind that, essentially, kids were visiting and contributing to the site, so I couldn't expect them to be Nobel Laureates or Picassos, along with English not being their first language in some cases. So, the bar has always been set rather low. But I was the gatekeeper and took my responsibility of good content seriously. That's why there isn't any NSFW content at The Pokémon Tower. Pokémon, in short, is targeted to kids, so I needed to ensure a healthy environment for them. So when I received a submission, I would give it a quick once-over to make sure it didn't have excessive swearing or really graphic content or super bad grammar or if it was way too short; that sort of thing. If it passed all of that, which at least 98%-99% did, you would get your work posted to The Pokémon Tower.
There were a significant amount of contributions to the website and it could be hard to tell exactly how much fanfics, fanart, fanvids, and other types of content were actually on the site. Do you have an estimation of how much content there is on The Pokémon Tower?
Jolt Master:
Heh, I figured you were probably going to ask that question, so I had to do some heavy digging into it...that and I was a bit curious too!
Okay, I'll start backwards here...there are 21 fanvid contributors that linked to 72 videos - I didn't host the videos themselves at The Pokémon Tower as I'd probably run out of server space if I'd done that, so it's just links only. Now, there are 633 fanart contributors which, if my math is correct, have contributed 4,616 pieces of artwork. And finally, the fanfics...that's a tough one. There are 1,497 fanfic contributors which hold about 15,147 files. Regarding the fanfics, however, they can be multi-part or one-shot fics, so it's near impossible to say how many fics are at The Pokémon Tower; just the number of files that contain them. But it is important to note that authors must have at least one fanfic in order to have a page, otherwise, the page gets removed. There are no blank pages at The Pokémon Tower. So, there are *at least* 1,497 fanfics. Although, based on the number of files, it's probable that there are between 4,000-6,000 fics. But honestly, it's a ballpark figure. I really have no way of knowing with any certainty.
So, overall, there are 1,890 individual contributors to The Pokémon Tower. It is every one of them that helped make The Pokémon Tower as popular as it was. Frankly, I couldn't have done it without them.
There are even sections of the website that are dedicated to music, downloads, and other media. What were your favourite pieces of content from the website?
Jolt Master:
That's a tough one, but what comes to mind would be the Golden Pokéball Awards - the art contests. I ran it every four months and tried to come up with interesting themes and I always really enjoyed seeing everyone's entry for whatever the theme of the contest was. What was especially cool about it was that's how The Pokémon Tower got its mascot - Lucia the Librarian! She's even got her own link in the main menu, so you can check it out anytime.
I think the other part of the contest was that, for me, I can't draw for crap. Ha ha ha! So, I would really enjoy (and probably be a bit envious of!) everyone else's talent. One that comes to mind would [be] the GPA contest where the theme was "Movies With The Pokémon Cast!" The one that won bronze was "Ash Ventura: Pokémon Detective" and I always got a real kick out of it personally and it's got some great detail in it.
Let’s touch on that a bit further! TPT held various awards for content published on the website. There was Reader’s Choice, Best In Category, and The Golden Pokéball Awards. Could you briefly describe each of these different award categories, and how participants were shortlisted to win?
Jolt Master:
Ah, yes, the fanfic and fanart contests! Those were always a good time, to be sure. So, the Reader's Choice Award (RCA) was a contest for best overall fanfic, regardless of category. The Best In Category (BIC) was exactly that - the best in a given category; AAMRN (Ash And Misty Romance Novel), JAJRN (Jessie And James Romance Novel), Team Rocket, etc. And the Golden Pokéball Awards (GPA) was the fanart contest. The way it would run is that I would update the menu area with a link to nominate a given fanfic for the RCA or BIC, depending on which one was running, and leave it up there for a week. The GPA would simply be a link to send me an email with an attachment for the art contest. Once I'd gathered all the entrants, I would go to a free voting website, enter all the names/fics/artwork/etc., then let the voting run for a week.
The very first RCA contest, for some reason, the site allowed for incessant spam voting. So, I had to find another site that allowed for IP address filtering. That helped considerably keep things a bit more down to earth and accurate, as it were. Once that was done, I would post the results, congratulate the winners, then update their respective pages with a little animated banner underneath the fanfic that indicated that this given fanfic won the RCA or that story got the BIC for Team Rocket fic, and so on. With the GPA, I would just update the page to indicate that the artist had won, then link to the GPA page itself. Submitting an entry to the contest wasn't an automatic submission to their page with the artwork itself...and I don't recall why I did it that way. Ha! Well, that's how I did it.
What are some of your favourite fanfics and fanart from the website, and why?
Jolt Master:
Oh, man, you had to ask that question. Honestly, it's been so long since I've read any of them, it's difficult to remember which ones really stood out. I would probably say, in a general way, my favorite fanfics and fanart would be the ones that would go on a very different take on the Pokémon canon - and there were plenty of fanfics that did that. One example would be Gemma's Rebirth chronicle. Yes, she used the Pokémon canon characters, but she also created a bunch of her own. She did some serious world-building and really expanded on that. So, I tended to be more drawn to that sort of stuff.
According to the FAQ section of your website, it states that you're not actually a fan of Pokémon, yet you continued to update and redesign the website after you inherited it. How were you able to find the motivation to maintain a significant amount of Pokémon content despite having no interest in the franchise? And why take it on in the first place?
Jolt Master:
Well, to answer both of your questions [it] was simply that I enjoyed website design - I'm a coder. My day job up until about the end of 2015 was being a technical support agent. So, I was deep into tech and geek culture with programming being a hallmark of that. During my professional career, I picked up all sorts of tech knowledge and, on my own, learned how to create websites in HTML - and eventually learned JavaScript, CSS, and PHP. I used this knowledge to improve The Pokémon Tower and make it better and easier to use. So, for me, The Pokémon Tower was a constantly evolving website design challenge, which I really enjoyed. That was my motivation, if you will, to keep The Pokémon Tower up and running.
Every page of The Pokémon Tower was *hand-coded* in HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. I typed out every piece of code that's written into The Pokémon Tower. And the fact that it still works today (except on mobile devices - sorry about that) delights me to no end. It is a testament to my amazing coding skills - ha ha ha!
I'll give two, hopefully quick, examples about the challenges. The first would be that in The Pokémon Tower's infancy, whenever you clicked on a link to go to a category of fanfics, the entire site would have to reload. Not a big deal nowadays, but back then...you're dealing with dial-up technology and the infancy/uncertainty of broadband - so it was really slow. So, I had to figure out a way to make The Pokémon Tower load faster/easier. Thus, I hit upon the idea to use frames. Frames, if you don't know, load *just* the link you clicked into a specific target area. So instead of reloading maybe 100k of data, it's just 15k or less, depending on the size of the file, AND it would only update that one area; everything else stayed where it was. Thus, The Pokémon Tower became easier and faster to traverse.
The other challenge, well, innovation would be a better word for it, would be what I'll call the "a-php" files. I wanted to somehow show a visitor to someone's page when that person last updated/added new content. So, after doing some heavy research on PHP commands and syntax, I was able to create some code that would provide links to a contributor's fanfic page, fanart page, and fanvid page, along with providing the dates of when those pages were updated last, if they existed. Along with that, I provided a space where they could link to their own personal website, if they wanted to. I'm super jazzed about that bit of code.
What was unexpected and happened over time was that I was building a community of people who liked Pokémon and I'd grown to really enjoy their company and discussion about Pokémon or whatever else they wanted to talk about. This is what essentially came out of The Pokémon Tower Forums. That became another aspect of my motivation to keep The Pokémon Tower going. The kids/visitors/contributors loved being there and I wanted that for them as well.
The most recent update on the website is from July 19th, 2012. While it’s great that The Pokémon Tower is still online, I was curious to hear why you stopped updating the website. What were your reasons?
Jolt Master:
Life. Yeah, pretty much life got in the way. I was well into raising a family, both of my sons were in junior high, and I was getting more and more involved their activities like school fundraisers, volunteering at the local church, and Cub/Boy Scouts (to which, I'm proud to say that both of my boys are Eagle Scouts :) ). So, it wasn't a matter of saying "I'm done with this." It was put to the side, sadly, and at this time, remains there.
Many early Pokémon websites, forums, groups and other communities are no longer online, and with it, a significant amount of passion, love and excitement that was expressed across those spaces have vanished. The Pokémon Tower still holds lots of examples of that creativity that was once shared, thanks to you continuing to host it. What do you think the future will be for The Pokémon Tower and its content beyond this interview?
Jolt Master:
You're welcome and great question! Honestly, I don't know. I think I keep paying for hosting, because I really don't want to see it come down. Like you've pointed out, all the contributors had - and I'm sure a significant number still do - loved their Pokémon, loved their stories, and loved their artwork. I didn't want that to go away. Believe it or not, I still get the occasional email asking if I'm going to update The Pokémon Tower or if I'm still around or 'wow, I remember this place, I spent so much time here.' And I do answer those emails. Why not, right?
As for the future...who knows. Right now though, I don't quite think I'm in the right spot to be updating The Pokémon Tower. Maybe I will be, but that's a few years down the road....heh, like 12 years isn't long enough, right? Nah, I'll probably return to The Pokémon Tower. It is bound to happen. But do know that I will continue to pay for the hosting, so The Pokémon Tower will remain standing.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions, Jolt! I admire that you took on a project, allowed it to grow into a home to showcase the creativity of Pokémon fans, and continue to host it so those creative works can be preserved and enjoyed all these years later. Do you have any final words you would like to share with our readers, and to anyone who visited or submitted content to The Pokémon Tower throughout its time online?
Jolt Master:
The pleasure was mine! Thank you for this fun trip down Nostalgia Lane! I really enjoyed it. And to everyone, please, while I'm not currently updating The Pokémon Tower, it is still a great place to visit. I cannot thank all the contributors enough for helping me make The Pokémon Tower so amazing. I truly could not have done it without you guys! And, as far as I'm concerned, The Pokémon Tower is STILL the BEST in Pokémon fanfiction and fanart! Thank you again for your time to interview me!
I would like to thank Jolt Master for taking the time to answer my questions, and thank him for his dedication to keeping The Pokémon Tower open so that people can still enjoy the many Pokémon fan works that exist.
That’s it for another week! 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!