Vol. 2, Issue 42 - Interview with Buried Relic
Vol. 2, Issue 42 - Interview with Buried Relic
An interview with Buried Relic, a Pokémon fansite which opened in 2023, providing guides, resources and tools related to older Pokémon titles. Plus, a recap of the latest Pokémon news
Welcome to Vol. 2, issue 42 of the Johto Times newsletter! As many of you know, we normally share interviews with fansites which date back to the late 90s and early 2000s. However, today we are interviewing Buried Relic, which was created around the same time as our newsletter, in February 2023! We also have a recap of the latest Pokémon news.
News
On October 10th, 2024, Game Freak released a statement regarding a server breach, where a significant amount of data from many Pokémon titles and media was shared online, along with personal information relating to employees and others from the company, two days later. Satoshi Tajiri, president of Game Freak and the creator of Pokémon, confirmed the data was obtained by an unauthorised connection to Game Freak servers in August 2024. Personal information such as names and company email addresses were obtained. Affected employees, both current and former, have been notified. Measures have been taken to prevent further recurrence through strengthening their security.
Source: Game Freak
Niantic have announced that Gigantamax Pokémon — which were first introduced in Pokémon Sword & Shield — will soon be available in Pokémon GO. From October 26th, 2024 at 10:00am to October 27th, 2024, at 8:00pm local time, Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise will make their Gigantamax debut at Power Spots throughout the game. Niantic released a pretty epic trailer to reveal the news, scored by Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi.
Players will only be able to defeat these ferocious Pokémon by working together, in teams of between ten and forty! These fully evolved Kanto starters also have a chance of being shiny, but will you be able to bring enough people together to defeat them? Further information about the Dynamax and Gigantamax game mechanics, details of the upcoming event, and the reveal trailer, can be found through the links below.
Source: Niantic, Niantic, YouTube
A new Pokémon distribution is available with Pokémon HOME, which received a new update yesterday (V3.2.2). Pokémon Scarlet & Violet players who complete their Paldea, Kitakami, and Blueberry Pokédex, can obtain a Shiny Meloetta! Players who successfully complete the requirements can obtain shiny Meloetta on Pokémon HOME for iOS/Android, by navigating to the Mystery Gift section. Players must have a linked Nintendo Account, and only one shiny Meloetta can be claimed per account.
Source: Pokémon HOME (in-game news), Bulbagarden
Feature: Interview with Buried Relic
Buried Relic is a Pokémon fansite, launched on February 16th, 2023, which provides guides, resources, and tools related to older Pokémon titles, with the aim of sharing knowledge. For this interview, I spoke with the site’s administrator to learn more about his website, his passion for Pokémon, and his thoughts on Pokémon fan websites of the past.
It’s great to be speaking with you, Buried Relic! Can you please introduce yourself and your website to our readers?
Buried Relic:
Thank you for the interview! I’m the webmaster of a small site called Buried Relic, where I try to provide guides about Pokémon topics that don’t usually get much attention, or need a more in-depth look into them, as well as tools to make some of these things less tedious. Buried Relic is relatively new compared to other websites that the Johto Times readers may have seen, but not any less passionate about Pokémon!
My main focus is the older games, especially Generations 3 to 5, but the content is not limited to those. I have gathered some knowledge about them through the years, and I aim to share as much as I can as long as it is useful for someone.
What inspired you to create your website?
Buried Relic:
I love to share the things I’m interested in with others and usually talk a lot about them (much to the dismay of my close ones), and Pokémon is obviously one of the biggest ones. Having a curious nature usually drives me to learn about every small, obscure thing about it. Making a website gave me a way to talk and write about these things without having to worry about whether or not someone wants to listen to them and deal with the need to share the information.
Another reason was to create tools or guides that I wish existed back when I was doing something related to them, like my Emerald Battle Frontier sets finder or the Battle Pyramid layout planner. The main thing I keep in mind is making content that I would use myself as a reader.
Other modern websites have also given some motivation into it, especially seeing that there are people still interested in sharing and consuming content through this medium.
Your website’s mascot is the fossil Pokémon Armaldo! What was the reason behind choosing this Pokémon to represent your website?
Buried Relic:
I have always liked Pokémon that weren’t widely popular, not for any specific reason; my taste just happened to align that way. Because of this, I have created bonds and memories with a lot of Pokémon that would usually be forgotten most of the time. I wanted the mascot of the website to be something that represented this feeling in some way without being too dramatic (for example, a Pokémon like Cryogonal, which I still love anyway). I also knew that I wanted to use something from Generation 3.
The choice didn’t take too long; I kind of had it clear since I started coding the web[site], which helped a lot choosing the theme. The Buried Relic was always my favourite dungeon from the first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games as a kid, which was the thing that started the thought process to find the idea I liked the most. I always related the Buried Relic with some of the friend areas: the Aged Chambers and the Ancient Relic. Which can make sense if you think about it; they’re all ruins. The Ancient Relic is also home to Aerodactyl, something that fits this whole ancient/ruins theme quite well (what are fossils, other than buried relics?). That’s when I thought [of] Armaldo, the fossil that I have the biggest bond with after I had one with a silly name in Platinum, and it’s not one of the first things that usually comes to mind when you think [of] that type of Pokémon.
The whole process can sound a bit confusing, but I just wanted to give a small insight into it. This is why you can find Pokémon related to all this through the website (Mew and Registeel from the Buried Relic dungeon in the logo, an Unown from the Aged Chambers as the favicon, or the Ancient Relic as the banner).
How has Pokémon influenced your creative output, and encouraged you to provide these resources for other people?
Buried Relic:
Just like a lot of people could say, Pokémon has always been a source of inspiration and a way to let the imagination develop. One of the main things I would do as a kid was usually draw Pokémon.
When it comes to websites, I actually always wanted to make my own blog and tried multiple times, but it never really went much further than designing the look of it. The most serious try I did was when I got into TCG tournaments and wanted to talk about the cards and review decks; I even had the first article written about either a Venusaur card or a grass deck, I can’t remember. What I do remember is the name the blog was going to have, “The Exeggutor Island”. Probably something inspired by PokéBeach, the website I always used for TCG news. Imagine my face when Alola released years later. As for providing people with resources, I guess that’s something that just comes from my nature; I’m usually inclined toward helping others and sharing things. The earliest memory I have of something similar was when I used to make tutorials for another game I also love, World of Warcraft. They were usually small guides on routes for farming items or reputation that I made for myself, but I do remember that the comments I got about them being useful motivated me enough to keep at it for a while. I also used the same forum to share lists of GBA games I liked. I believe the forum doesn’t exist anymore and those posts are not accessible, which is a shame.
Much later I stumbled [upon] Twitch and Pokémon streams, which was the first real contact I had with online Pokémon communities. Through those years, I learnt a lot of things about the games and always wanted to know more about the more niche facts. Something that never sat right with me is how some people would rant about information being wrong on the internet due to fake rumours, but never do much to actually provide the correct information. Some of them did, and for that I thank them. But even then, sometimes it would be kept locked behind Discord server links or something similar. One thing that I learnt is to keep a safe distance from some things, so it always annoyed me to not have easy access to that information. That’s one of the things that motivated me to share the things that I know instead of keeping them for myself. A small fan website like the Buried Relic is not much and may not go around enough to share that information with everyone, but it was the best shot I had to make that a reality.
My first impression of your website was that it is aesthetically pleasing. Visually, it’s a rather beautiful layout, with lots of great art assets and a cosy feel to it. How long have you been creating art and designing?
Buried Relic:
Thank you! The general aim I had for the design of the website was to represent a vibe from the old Pokémon movies, which is something that always stood out to me: how some of them have a [slight] yellowish tint/filter to them (at least the versions I watched), which always gave me a feeling of nostalgia and cosiness, something that probably helped kid me feel part of the adventure. Take the Lucario and Manaphy movies as an example. I had this idea in mind while choosing the colours of the theme.
In the past few years, you could say I spent time with things related to art. [For as long as I can remember], I always liked to draw in general, but for some time now I have been leaving normal digital art aside and focusing on going back to my first love: pixel art. As a kid, I spent countless hours editing sprites from multiple games. When it comes to Pokémon, fusing sprites or creating new ones was almost a daily thing when I used the computer, with only MS Paint as the main tool. I got a lot of motivation from playing old GBA ROM hacks like Pokémon Chaos Black or Pokémon Quartz. I would usually put these edited sprites into a program called “Pivot Stickfigure Animator” to make silly stickfigure animations, as it also accepted PNG files. Making bad fighting animations while listening to the Ghostbusters main theme and waiting for my friends to login to Habbo Hotel—that sounds like the cringiest thing ever, but those were good times.
So many older fan websites that were first created during the late 90s and early 2000s no longer exist, except for a handful of larger more established websites, so it is really something special to see a new generation of Pokémon fans creating their own, especially those who have chosen to focus on the early era of Pokémon. What are some of the Pokémon fan websites you remember visiting?
Buried Relic:
As a kid, I started using computers and the internet very early on, but back then I never really cared about the social aspect of it [so much as] learning new things, so I would usually visit sites that would give information about the games and the occasional one with fanmade ROM hacks, but my focus was mostly the Spanish wikis. I was always playing Emerald, so seeing the sprites of the missing Kanto Pokémon on those [sites] caught my eye a lot. As a side note, English is not my first language, so I wouldn’t usually visit the typical websites everyone knows.
One big memory I have from the time before the release of Platinum is going to this fan website called “Pokémon Negro” (“Pokémon Black” in Spanish, way before the official games), which was one of those Pokémon browser games that used to be popular back then. But the thing I was interested in was their Pokédex section, which included all the Pokémon up to Arceus. Coming from Diamond and not having looked up much information on the internet this time around, I never knew about some of the evolutions added to already-existing Pokémon, like Tangrowth or Rhyperior, so when I saw that page with all those names near the end of the Pokédex (which was just text), my naive kid mind thought they were new legendaries to be released in Platinum. The first thing I did was run to my brother, screaming, “New legendaries!”.
Other sites I used to visit let you create these small Pokémon adoption cards that you would then use on forums and get experience every time someone clicked it. I honestly just liked to make them with cool nicknames to save them on my computer, but these seemed to be very popular back then, as well as the trainer card generators.
Pokéxperto is another website I used a lot that still rocks the old style of website layouts.
Nowadays, it’s still one of the big websites about news and info regarding the games. Some people from the English-speaking community know it, mostly from social media, but for those that don’t, its purpose is basically giving information in a similar vein to Serebii, but in Spanish.
Like I mentioned before, I also liked to visit websites that focused on browser Pokémon games. The one in which I was most interested was this one called “Pokémon Crater”, eventually being remade into “Pokémon Vortex”. You could walk around interactive maps to find Pokémon and also battle. In this game, you had multiple variants for each Pokémon to collect: shiny, dark, mystic, metallic, ancient (which I believe was from the older versions), shadow… It obviously fed a lot into the shiny hunting hobby I would eventually have. I still visit it from time to time.
A lot of the fansites we cover tend to be from the late 90s and early 2000s, but Buried Relic is a much newer website, which launched on February 16th, 2023. What are your thoughts on classic Pokémon websites of the past now that you have a site of your own?
Buried Relic:
They existed during an internet era very different from what we have nowadays, where social media didn’t exist as we know it and forums were the main social output people had. The Internet was in its early days back then, and having an outlet to share your passion with the world for the first time must have been mind-blowing. You could say that the people who put themselves out there back then were the pioneers that took the first steps that would eventually lead to many of the things that we sometimes take for granted (because of globalisation or due to the fact that we have the internet [in] the palm of our hands thanks to smartphones), especially considering how [limited] the access to knowledge was compared to the present or the uncertainty of the future with Y2K. I believe that if these websites didn’t exist, we would still have had some kind of replacement, as human nature usually calls us to have a discourse about the things we love, but it definitely would have been different in the present.
That’s one thing that I do appreciate about the classic websites, which is how they were aimed at talking about the things they were passionate about. Nowadays it feels like there’s a general feeling of negativity towards most of the media we consume, even if one would call themselves a fan. This becomes more apparent the more time you spend on social media platforms. We should spend more time talking about the things we like and less about the things we hate. That’s why a surge of new fan websites similar to the classic ones is good news.
What were your earliest memories and experiences of Pokémon growing up?
Buried Relic:
Pokémon had always been part of my life [for as long as] I can remember, because my older brother was already into it. It wasn’t until Emerald that I owned my own game, though. That and Mystery Dungeon Blue Rescue Team were the main games I played all the time. It was during a time when I used to spend a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms, and these games were a huge help to [keep] my mind on other things. I was playing there all the time with this collection of small Pokémon figures I have, imagining they were Mystery Dungeon characters and making my own stories. The Emerald Battle Frontier was also something I sank hours into. I oddly still remember a kid that was sitting there as well, but he was playing LeafGreen. He came to me to watch me play Emerald, but in my mind I was thinking, “But I want to see YOU play LeafGreen!” because I didn’t have that game yet.
When Diamond and Pearl came out (around July in Europe), for some odd reason I chose to fill an entire box with Budew. I guess that I liked it so much that this was how it went as soon as I found it. I still keep one of those Budews as a Roserade, with the 2007 date. Eventually I reached the Eterna City Gym, around the time that we picked up my brother from a summer camp. “NEW POKÉMON!” were the first words that came from my mouth as soon as I saw him. Me and my brother have always gotten the games as they came out, and each would get the opposite version due to how our box legendary preferences aligned, so it has always worked out perfectly. We have liked similar games, so he’s been the person I have shared my gaming hobby with the most. There was always a big lack of Pokémon fans in my class, but that never really bothered me because of it.
My mother has always been on the lookout for the things Pokémon released and went as far as getting me games like Platinum with the preorder bonuses, no matter how tough things got. Having SoulSilver on my birthday was not just a surprise, but more than enough for me. In Generation 5, I remember I liked all starters, so I gave her the choice, which was Snivy.
The day there was a Pokémon movie on TV, it was unskippable for me. The worst part was when I got so into them that I would get sad when the credits rolled, or even cry with the Manaphy movie. The Darkrai one is still my favourite, although I was never able to watch the Jirachi one, as it never released dubbed in my country. I’m still currently trying to collect all of the movies in physical format. As for the anime, it was almost the same as well, although I stopped watching around the end of Generation 4. Still, I have lots of memories of my favourite episodes, especially the Pokémon Ranger Deoxys’ Crisis.
What are some of your most beloved Pokémon items that you own?
Buried Relic:
Obviously the old original games are the things with the most sentimental value, but I feel like I [have more appreciation for] the memories I have gathered thanks to these games than any rare or special item I could buy or find. There are so many that I could talk about them for days and never run out. If I have to choose something that isn’t the games themselves, I’d say all the things that were given to me as a gift from my close ones, like my Croagunk plushie (my favourite Pokémon alongside Toxicroak).
You are fast approaching your second anniversary online. Congratulations! What ideas and plans do you have for the Buried Relic in the years ahead?
Buried Relic:
There is some stuff that is currently on the [site] to update, so that may be the most obvious thing. I’ve also been thinking for a while about making a small section to talk in a more casual tone about different topics, similar to a blog.
Something that I want to explore more on the [site] is the battling side of the games. I have always been more interested in the PVE facilities than shiny hunting, as weird as it may sound. There’s something exciting about creating a team from scratch and upgrading it as you test it to eventually cross a big streak of victories. I have previously managed to guide someone who was barely interested in battling into winning [a] Generation 4 gold symbol, so I may start from there for everyone who wants to beat these challenges but is too afraid to start.
Although I do have this need of trying to make a more complex tool, finding the right project idea is a bit difficult by myself. We will see what the future brings, though.
Buried Relic, it was great to learn more about you and your website! Before we end this interview, do you have any closing comments for Johto Times readers and visitors of Buried Relic?
Buried Relic:
Pokémon has been an important force for me during the more difficult times, a sentiment that a lot of people can probably agree with. We are here to share our love for these small digital creatures with everyone and learn new things as we go forward in a world where things can be grey sometimes. Remember to act with others the way you would like others to act with you, and try to always help when you can. If you happen to be interested in these types of websites and would like to try making your own, there are multiple resources out there to help you get started. Or any other type of Pokémon project you may have. I know I speak for everyone when I say that we would love to see what you can make!
Thanks to Johto Times for having me and to everyone who has spent their time reading this!
A huge thank you to the owner of Buried Relic for taking the time to answer our questions. We wish the very best of luck to the website in the years ahead and hope it can live up to the legacy of many other fan websites that came before it!
That’s all for this week’s issue! If you enjoy what Johto Times provides, be sure to share our newsletter with your friends and loved ones to 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!