Vol. 2, Issue 30 - Interview with Lycanroc.Net
An interview with Cat333Pokémon (Cat) from Lycanroc.Net, a mixed media fan site, with origins dating back to August 2003. Plus, a recap on the latest Pokémon news and more from the Johto Times mailbag
Welcome to another weekly issue of the Johto Times newsletter! In Vol. 2, issue 30, the focus is on Lycanroc.Net, a mixed media fan website run by Cat, who I am very happy to interview. His history with creating fan sites dates back to 2003, with sites including Mario Minus World, Buizel.net, Floatzel.net, and eventually Lycanroc.Net. Cat also ran a forum community called Victory Road, which was active for eleven years.
There’s also the usual recap of Pokémon news, and some more from the Johto Times mailbag!
News
Gamescom, the annual trade fair for video games, will take place once again this year, between Wednesday 21st – Sunday August 25th, 2024. A post from the official Twitter account confirms that The Pokémon Company will be one of the line-up highlights at this year's event. No specific details have been announced regarding what TPC will be sharing at this time, but any announcements will be shared here on Johto Times!
Source: Gamescom Twitter, Gamescom Website
A new Pokémon Scarlet & Violet distribution has begun. Players can now obtain a Fuecoco based on the one Roy has in Pokémon Horizons via Mystery Gift, with the code 909TEAMUP06. This code is valid until January 31st, 2025.
Players still have time to obtain previously announced distributions for Liko's Sprigatito (L1K0W1TH906), which is available until September 30th, 2024, and Dot's Quaxly (DOT1STPARTNER), available until November 30th, 2024, which complete this set.
Feature: Interview with Lycanroc.Net
Lycanroc.Net is a mixed media fan site by Cat333Pokémon (Cat), which features a range of Pokémon-themed content such as guides, video game screenshots, games, and a variety of downloadable content. Since it began, it has received over 8.2 million visits, according to its website hit counter at the time of interview. It even includes content unrelated to Pokémon, allowing Cat to express his other hobbies and interests. Cat also ran the Victory Road forum from November 2006 to December 2017.
Thank you for joining me for this interview, Cat! Can you please introduce yourself and your website, Lycanroc.Net, to our Johto Times readers?
Cat:
Hello there! I’m Cat333Pokémon, webmaster of a number of Pokémon fan sites and communities since the late 2000s, most notably my flagship site, Lycanroc.Net, and formerly the Victory Road forum. I am a software developer by profession, picking up programming projects in my spare time when something piques my interest.
What inspired you to create the website in the first place?
Cat:
My father developed an interest in having a web presence in 2000. He had also just started getting into songwriting and bought a domain with basic hosting where he could share some information about his band. In August 2003, he finally paid for some hosting space to actually share some songs, creative writing, and nature photography. On that website, we had a few fan pages for some of our favorite media, and naturally, I had a section for Pokémon. It wasn’t much, but I put together some simple character lists, a handful of cheat codes, and some scans of my favorite trading cards.
While entirely built with Microsoft Publisher, I was able to learn the basics of web design and had a place where I could have a few words online. What kid in the early 2000s didn’t want that? Some of these ancient articles are even part of Lycanroc.Net to this day.
The origins of Lycanroc.Net date back to 2006, with a website called Mario Minus World, and was later named Buizel.Net, Floatzel.Net, and eventually Lycanroc.Net. What was the reasoning behind the name changes and the website’s evolution throughout the years?
Cat:
In July 2006, after a few years of allowing that band website to stagnate, my father found a new hosting provider and bought several domain names. At that time, I was fascinated with video game glitches and tricks, so I wanted to try my hand at making a website documenting some of them. He gave me mere minutes to pick out a domain name so I could have a website of my own, and I came up with the equivocally clever name of Mario Minus World. He also gave me a copy of FrontPage so I could use a tool more oriented towards website development that provided a glimpse into the HTML that made it happen.
Through the years, its content morphed, and I focused more on Pokémon after the North American release of Pokémon Diamond & Pearl in April 2007. I got really into those games, and several of the newest Pokémon shot to the top of my favorites list. Buizel in particular caught my interest, so in February 2008 I moved the site over to Buizel.Net, then again to Floatzel.Net in 2009 when I decided I liked Floatzel more, and I held onto that name for many years. Over the course of these updates, I added a forum, tried out a few different chat rooms, and even began live-streaming video games on the burgeoning Ustream service.
Leading up to the Japanese release of Pokémon Black and White in the autumn of 2010, Floatzel.Net got a redesign themed around Zoroark, my favorite Pokémon to this day. I freshened up a lot of older content and integrated more PHP to make dynamic database requests of live content from the forum, especially the news feed. I was in and out of various projects, even considering a return to the idea of a website centered on game quirks, but I abandoned that and used the back-end code to rebuild my website on a new domain, and I moved to Lycanroc.Net (my contemporary second-favorite) in 2017.
A lot of the Pokémon fan websites I’ve covered previously have been almost exclusively dedicated to the franchise, but Lycanroc.Net has a range of different content, some of which doesn’t focus on Pokémon at all. Why did you go with this approach?
Cat:
As mentioned above, the website started as a place where I could simply share whatever I happened to be interested in at the time: MIDI sequences, Windows applications, artwork, silly error messages, galleries of screenshots from games I happened to be playing, and so forth. Occasionally, I’d find an interesting topic to write an article about, or write a review for a game I recently played… mostly Pokémon, of course. There was also the phase from around 2008 through early 2010 where I recreated many songs in Mario Paint Composer. Moreover, many features of my websites gave me opportunities to try learning new coding techniques and develop things with new tools while maintaining a fun and welcoming atmosphere.
The Victory Road Adoption Center was a simple adoptables type of website where users could “adopt” a pet Pokémon to place in their forum signatures, and clicking on one would level it up. With how Pokémon evolution works, I was able to integrate a core feature of the Pokémon franchise at predetermined levels, unless of course the owner wished to keep their pets at earlier stages. Forked evolutions like Eevee even prompted for the desired outcome of their eventual evolution. I also added a few non-Pokémon pets like Yoshi, and—during the My Little Pony craze—the “Mane Six” ponies and Spike from Friendship Is Magic. A few years later, as a geology-themed April Fools’ Day joke, I added a bunch of Pet Rocks. The website and back-end were custom-tailored to the Victory Road community, and logging in with a forum account allowed users to keep everything on one profile. Over its six-year run, there had been almost 100 million views and over 10 million clicks on nearly 30,000 pets.
Another project was the Pokékaki, an oekaki centered around the Java-based ChibiPaint and Shi-Painter drawing applets. Visitors were allowed to draw whatever they wanted and share it with others. Similar to the adoptables, the oekaki used forum accounts to integrate users, moderation, and other key features. While it didn’t have quite the same run as the adoptables, there were a few devoted users posting new illustrations every week. Around the time interest in it waned, Java was no longer a standard feature in web browsers, and adapting it to an HTML5-based applet was a low priority.
Out of all the content on your website, what are some of your favourites?
Cat:
I’m fairly proud of the Pokémon Rater and the analytics that I’ve put into it. Visitors are presented with two Pokémon, chosen based on their ranks, and asked to select which one they like more. Since its inception, it has received about a quarter of a million votes from all around the world. Sadly, like many other projects, I haven’t updated it in years, and it notably doesn’t feature any eighth or ninth generation Pokémon yet.
The Pokémon Purity Test is another long runner from the site’s earliest days. It was originally sourced from the Mario Purity Test on the long-defunct SMBhq website, a massive Super Mario Bros. fansite that featured a plethora of content on our favorite Italian plumbers. With permission from the owner, I rewrote many of the questions to be themed around Pokémon obsession, collecting, and gameplay. I return to it every year or two to revise questions as they fall out of favor for the general Pokémon fandom (does anyone even make Winamp skins anymore?), or to include questions about the latest games.
In addition to Lycanroc.Net, you also ran a forum which was later separated from the main website, given its own domain, and named Victory Road. The community ran for eleven years between November 2006 and December 2017. How would you describe your community, and its members?
Cat:
I would say that the community was quite close-knit in its heyday, which was around 2009 through 2011. Many of the regular users were people who had followed me on YouTube when I was making Mario Paint Composer arrangement videos, or watched me broadcast on the nascent Ustream, many years before Twitch became popular. PokeRemixStudio also helped bring in a lot of folks from his own YouTube channel. As the site grew, I had to maintain an active staff to keep interesting discussions going and fight spammers and trolls. I didn’t even really know what I was doing half the time.
Victory Road had around 1500 active members, and around 288,000 posts. With such an active and invested community, why did you decide to close it?
Cat:
The peak era of Victory Road was within the first few years of its life, when I had also run an associated chat room. As activity dwindled around 2014 and I graduated from college, I spent less time updating the forum and allowed it to decline in its final years so I could move forward with my personal life. The latter years also aligned with many active members going to college, getting jobs, or starting families, no longer having the time to idle on a Pokémon forum.
Over the course of time, many forum communities have shut down, taking with them a significant amount of conversation and history due to the lack of proper archiving. Despite Victory Road’s closure, the forum is still available to view. Why was it important for you to keep the forum online?
Cat:
As many online forums have shuttered with the rise of social media, and with how many communities eschew archiving any kind of legacy (even big names like RuneScape), I feel it is very important to retain an artifact of an era where a group of people organically found a self-hosted community centered around their interests instead of as a part of a larger website built around advertising revenue, data warehousing, and—soon enough—machine learning. It truly is a relic of a bygone era. With that said, I have been working on rewriting a basic forum viewer to keep an archive online without needing to host the massive monolithic vBulletin 3 software that was written twenty years ago.
I would love to know how you first became interested in Pokémon. What are your earliest memories of getting into the series?
Cat:
In 1999, I had first heard others at school discussing some of the characters from the franchise, but I didn’t really pay it much regard because it wasn’t of much interest. It wasn’t until the trading cards made their way to class that I thought much about it.
In particular, however, I was dropped off at a friend’s house before school for a carpool because my parents had to go to work very early, and there wasn’t much to do [at] that wee hour in the morning. I found myself frequently watching TV and channel surfing, and I stumbled upon the Pokémon anime. After being mildly acquainted with some of the characters via the trading cards, I promptly found myself engrossed in watching Pokémon battles and Ash’s journey to become a Pokémon Master. I began to look forward to watching reruns each morning before school. Sure, I saw the episodes completely out of order, but that didn’t matter to my impressionable mind.
Are there any Pokémon-related items and merchandise from over the years which you have held onto, and have some personal importance to you?
Cat:
While I have pared down a lot of my personal possessions over the last decade, I held onto many of my original video games—most still have my childhood save data—as well as a few plushies and action figures.
The most interesting, however, is that I maintain what I call the “CardDex,” a binder with a trading card for every Pokémon within certain rules for uniformity, including alternate forms when applicable. A lot of my childhood cards made it into that binder, and I personalized it by selecting the card with the most interesting artwork for each Pokémon.
What does the future hold for Lycanroc.Net and any other Pokémon-focused projects you are involved with?
Cat:
Unfortunately, ever since the entire Dexit situation with Pokémon Sword & Shield, my interest in more modern Pokémon projects has fallen off drastically. It also doesn’t help that the Pokémon games on the 3DS can no longer be played online. I do still occasionally get enthusiastic over interesting project ideas, though. Last year, I messed around with a website where you can generate a list of Pokémon catchable in each game up through the sixth generation, useful for catching challenges or Living Pokédexes in older games.
Not all is doom and gloom (and Vileplume), though! I would still like to update some of the stagnant website projects, such as completely overhaul the Pokémon Purity Test to be in a more modern format that accepts different answer types than just yes/no, as well as make improvements to the Pokémon Rater beyond just adding the later generations. Hey, I did actually completely rewrite the “Who’s That Pokémon?” game to avoid duplicates and allow easier updates.
However, my passion for Pokémon has transferred into an analogous hobby: birdwatching. I can continue to try to catch them all through a camera lens instead of a Poké Ball, and photograph as many species as possible. My BirdDex is up to 475 in the United States alone. ;)
Thank you for taking the time to speak to me, Cat! Do you have any final words you would like to share with our readers and visitors of your communities?
Cat:
Victory Road and Floatzel.Net certainly got me through a lot of rough patches in my life, and they helped define my high school and college years. They shaped the person I became and taught me a lot of useful skills like website development, system administration, and personnel management. I must also extend my thanks to the staff members, especially Yoshi648 (nowadays going by Yoshizard) and KingOfKYA, who stuck around for many years and made the site flourish.
I’d like to thank you for having this interview with me; it’s been a pleasure!
I want to thank Cat for taking the time to answer my questions, and for giving us an insight into his website and its history. I wish Lycanroc.Net the very best for its future.
Mailbag
It's time for more from the mailbag! On two previous occasions, Johto Times has shared some fantastic fanart from a reader called Corylus, and it seems he isn't done yet! This time, he has shared a watercolour artwork of Poliwag!
Poliwag was done for the German Pokémon forum "BisaBoard" as part of a monthly challenge. It's simple and easy to draw. My brother once had a TOMY figurine, which we bought at a flea market together with a bunch of other Pokémon. Unfortunately neither of us has them anymore.
Corylus, Germany
Corylus! I am happy to see yet another great piece of artwork submitted to the mailbag. Your Poliwag is very cute, and reminds me of its early appearances in the Pokémon TCG in the late 90s and early 2000s. Thank you very much for sharing!
Former Victory Road admin Yoshi here! Thanks for this interview, it was fun going back with Cat reminiscing about the old times and piecing together the history of our little internet hideaway. Victory Road happened at a pivotal moment for me as I was getting into Pokemon proper since I only had a passing interest in it during the Red/Blue days, so it was nice to have a place to discuss this new interest. Much like Cat these places serve as a great time capsule for us of our high school and college days and I treasure them dearly. Truly a relic of a different world that was focused on sharing a common interest with others in a small community and not just driving ad revenue by screaming into a void. Thanks again Cat and everyone on Victory Road for the memories.