Vol. 3, Issue 20 - Interview with PLDH
An interview with nza from the long-running Pokémon fan community PLDH, established in July 2006, plus a recap of the latest Pokémon news
Welcome to Vol. 3, issue 20 of Johto Times! This week, we share an interview with nza, the webmaster of PLDH, a community resource for Pokémon fans which has been online since April 2006. Plus, we have a recap of the latest Pokémon news.
News
The Pokémon Fossil Museum is a travelling exhibition based on Pokémon, featuring illustrations and life-sized skeletons of fossil Pokémon along with a mix of real-life fossils. For the first time ever, it will travel outside of Japan next year and open at Chicago’s Field Museum in the USA on May 22nd, 2026.
Source: Field Museum, Pokémon
A Wonder Pick Event is currently underway in Pokémon TCG Pocket, featuring Cosmog and Lycanroc promo cards. During the event period, specific missions are taking place which allow players to receive shop tickets, and these can be exchanged for accessories featuring Solgaleo and Lillie. The event continues until May 19th, 2025. See the in-game news for more details!
Source: Pokémon TCG Pocket in-game news
A new Pokémon distribution has been announced based on Wolfe Glick's Incineroar, a Pokémon which helped him reach the top of the Masters Division during the 2025 Europe International Championships. It will be available via Mystery Gift. The code will be given out during the official 2025 North American International Championship stream, between June 13th and June 15th, 2025, and will be valid until June 28th, 2025.
Source: Pokémon
Pokémon Sword & Shield’s soundtrack is now available via the Nintendo Music app, featuring 138 tracks from the game and its DLC. It joins Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Pokémon Scarlet & Violet’s soundtracks, which were previously added to the app. A Nintendo Switch Online subscription is required to use the app.
Source: Nintendo Music app
Feature: Interview with PLDH
PLDH (Pokémon League and The DarkHunters) is a community resource for Pokémon fans, which began as a community on the Pokémon Diamond board of GameFAQs in April 2006. A website was created in July of that year, containing useful tools and information, which was online and operational until around September 2017. The PLDH community effort has continued across social media since then, and I am happy to be speaking to its webmaster nza, who represented the team and kindly answered my questions about the PLDH community.
It is a pleasure to be speaking to you, nza! Let’s begin with an introduction! Please tell us about yourself and introduce your community, PLDH!
nza:
Hello, and thank you very much for honoring the website with this interview! Despite being “down” for several years now, it is still something very near and dear to my heart, and I know that that is true for others as well. Look no further than our Twitter or Bluesky accounts, where one of the original members of the PLDH clans, going by Ze Colonel, is still actively running them and publishing nearly daily to great effect. He has single-handedly kept the spirit of PLDH alive since I had to take the site down in 2019, [and] we are very grateful for that!
Way back in the early-mid 2000s, MySpace was kicking off the modern social media landscape, and it was truly the wild west. You could embed JavaScript on your profile to create silly things like effects around a mouse cursor. I generally liked embedding music on the page. At any rate, that is where my journey playing around with code started.
In 2006 I wanted to take the very limited understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that I got from MySpace a lot further and make my own Pokémon website. I was always in awe of the fan sites that I saw when browsing the Internet in the Red/Blue and Gold/Silver days of the late '90s and finally had the knowledge I needed to get one started. At this time, I was already in college and fairly uncommitted to the path I had chosen as a Bio/Chem double major. What I learned working on PLDH and the enjoyment I got from coding led to me changing my major and ultimately is why I have the career I do today. I don’t write code at my job much anymore, but I am okay with that!
PLDH began as two separate clan groups on a video game resource website called GameFAQs, then later became a Pokémon fan community. What can you tell us about PLDH’s origins?
nza:
Sure. [There was a] great deal of time that passed between when the games Diamond and Pearl were announced and when localized versions of those games made their way to North America and Europe, which were the primary sources of GameFAQs' member base at that time. During those long days and dry spells in [the] news, us diehards [were] still conversing on the GameFAQs Diamond board quite a bit, and there were a number of factions or clans that were born with their own distinct traits.
I had joined two, the Pokémon League and The DarkHunters. As you can guess, the League would consist of trainers emulating a gym and Elite Four-like ladder challenge. The DarkHunters were more of a battle-centric group. We’d gotten relatively close as groups with some overlap, and we couldn’t converse about everything we wanted to on a forum where those topics would get moderated for being off topic.
As we wanted to keep the good times going, I located a free forum host called InvisionFree and another member, [called GodOfBlaze] as I recall, set it up as a combo forum. It was not yet “PLDH”. While there, I was researching self-hosting and using some open-source forum software called phpBB for the two groups that I was in to create a website beyond a simple message board. From there I bought a domain, named it PLDH.net, and on July 7th, 2006, I launched the website!
Around this time, Pokémon Diamond & Pearl were about to be released outside of Japan. In your experience, what was the feeling of Pokémon fans within these groups during this time?
nza:
The Diamond and Pearl games used the Nintendo DS’s native Wi-Fi capabilities for sharing Friend Codes to facilitate PvP [player vs. player] battles and trading for the first time. Prior to that, fans of battling against others over the Internet were constrained to builds on [fan-made battle simulator] NetBattle and trading was not possible.
There was a lot of excitement in the broader community around being able to battle against your friends for fun as well as being able to organize and participate in tournaments using the Pokémon builds that we had invested our time into creating. While there were those who had friends or family in real life, I got the sense that there were also many players, such as myself, that would be experiencing battling and trading with others for the first time. That it could be with players the world over and not necessarily local to the immediate area or even your state or country added a whole other layer to the excitement.
It’s important to note, too, that the run-up to these games' releases from their announcement date was quite long, just under two years for the release in Japan, and then about six more months for localization to be completed for the North American release (even longer for the EU and Australia!). As a result of that, there was a lot of downtime in between news drips from CoroCoro and elsewhere, so we filled that time with myriad activities, and a lot of those centered around what we would do with these new online activities and how we could organize them.
There were two primary concepts, not necessarily competing against each other but with different takes, focused on battling: one, that players could set up and emulate Pokémon League-like challenge ladders, and two, that players would organize in teams or clans to battle against each other for group supremacy. From a remote-first perspective for console-based games, this was all pretty novel, as while Super Smash Bros. had been doing in-person tournaments for years, it wasn’t until Brawl released in 2008 that teams and crews began to spring up online.
Given the extended periods of time it took to localize games, importing was really the norm among diehard fans at that time. I remember [fondly] those periods of very loosely learning enough hiragana and katakana to navigate and [troubleshoot] getting through the Japanese with others once we made it past that first release date.
At some point, the decision was made to create a forum, which eventually led to a website being made. What encouraged you to create a fan website?
nza:
It was really a combination of a few ingredients: a desire to put my own spin on the fan sites I had seen in the past, to learn how to code and create useful tools, and to bring forward something that I thought was unique to the broader community. The website was born out of a League group and a clan group, but my broader vision was to try and create [a] hub where like-minded groups could organize and battle against each other in whatever format (League, clan v. clan, etc.) they wanted. That concept and many of the other tools I created never took off, though. What I learned in writing them, however, was highly constructive in coding and thus helped me along quite a bit in becoming an engineer. Besides, I enjoyed the challenge in doing it regardless of the outcome.
There were really motivated members doing myriad things. From massive role-play threads and games that themselves garnered hundreds of thousands of posts to Ze Colonel and his affinity for video editing for the YouTube account, being in-the-know and on-top of the news, to Teej (aka ToppeHatte or cap nowadays) and his combination of recording game playthroughs and artistic talent. I wanted everyone to shine and give them a platform if they wanted it. With these various elements that came together, we created a website that had a lot of character and skill among the team. To be able to branch out to YouTube and have a channel doing “Let’s Plays” with hundreds of thousands of views on a single video in 2008, before they were the commonplace thing we know them as today, felt really special. The same is true for what Ze Colonel continues to accomplish running our social media accounts on Twitter and Bluesky.
I had no intention of doing news, but we quickly fell into it by finding things like copyrights and obscure bits that we knew were good information that wasn’t out there. The reality of reveals at that time was that any news around new games could come from anywhere, it seemed (beyond CoroCoro, [it could come from] Sunday game shows in Japan, other magazines, off-beat but official Pokémon websites in Japanese or Portuguese, and foreign language copyright and trademark websites, even!). I found that, for the time and place, it was actually pretty fun to do. Often you would see news presented without attribution, so it wasn’t always clear where the information was coming from, so we really pushed on the idea of sourcing, [which] was really only commonplace at Bulbanews back then. In doing so, we were really capturing how broad the zeitgeist was and giving that lens to anyone who visited and clicked through via their own curiosity. Ze Colonel shared the facts with an endearing character and appreciation for the games that followers on Twitter and Bluesky still get to experience today.
In talking with Ze about this recently, I found the following very insightful and spot-on: “This is thinking retrospectively, but when you look at the state of the Internet currently, it’s hard not to wax nostalgic about forums and forum culture. Forums provided venues for people drawn together through a central interest to interact and make friends in a way that is often more difficult, more awkward in real life. It eliminates the hard part – revealing yourself and your interests, e.g. you know, that potential embarrassment of being a Pokémon loving dweeb – by putting up a billboard and letting the shy outsider spy the gathered crowd. It then lets that mutual interest give way for deeper friendships and broader discussions using subforums, user topics, etc., to trigger discussions of other similarities or interests or potential bonds. Everyone on the forum is under the same unifying banner, and there [are] no follower counts or social media credit to interfere.”
One useful resource from PLDH was the Pokédex, a comprehensive tool allowing fans to find information about Pokémon locations, items, moves, and even the size of Pokémon characters, across all six mainline generations that were available at the time. Tell us about the development of this tool!
nza:
Haha, yeah, the PokéDex definitely grew with me as I learned how to write software. Initially it all ran on hard-coded PHP arrays, and I got a lot of help from members of the community compiling the data that made those arrays. Eventually those arrays got walked into a SQL database and grew a lot more from there.
There was quite a bit of luck involved in the community, in that those of us interested in creating and running the various things we were into were like-minded. One of the ways that like-mindedness worked well was that we were very big on sourcing materials and providing credit. Putting together the initial database of course meant getting the information from elsewhere, and I always felt great about our Credits page where we linked to and gave kudos to the sources for that information, from stats to graphics. Likewise, we did a great job of packaging everything we had compiled and sharing those packages via the website with anyone that wanted to use them.
Once the PokéDex was up and running in SQL, it went through a few iterations where my affinity [for toying] around with code and presenting things that were there in the data in a new way really took off. There were a lot of great PokéDexes out at that time; for example, Veekun really had the gold standard for quality and utility. I saw that and still had ideas about what further information I could present. You mention Pokémon character sizes: I thought it would be fun if we could actually visualize how big something like a Tyranitar would be standing next to us, so I created a little visualizer where you could pick a Pokémon and use a slider to reach your height/weight and see that contrast.
Some of the other ideas at the time consisted of collating all of the data around Pokémon types and presenting that information on a given type’s page. For example, aggregating each of a Pokémon’s individual stats and then ranking that aggregated amount among all other types. It was fun to expose something you could effectively intuit; [for example,] Steel types have a great Defense stat, but to see that, what the numbers were that proved it, was neat. You could also learn things that you might not have expected!
A final example among many others was providing a stat table that showed how IVs, EVs, and natures would affect stats at level 100. This in itself was not unique; however, the simple enhancement of allowing the tool to accept any number for levels from 1-100 to show exact stat ranges at each of those levels was.
Ultimately, I did not like how some Pokédexes required clickthrough to get to some information and how they were organized. Veekun was the gold standard, and I wanted to put my own spin on how we could optimize presenting a lot of information to a great utilitarian effect while minimizing clickthrough or having to search further. So, consolidating to a single page and enabling users to choose how they wanted data presented and organized was really the final evolution of the PokéDex: In the end it wasn’t about my vision and what I wanted to put out there; it was about how everyone might have this same sense of seeing the page in their own way, and that is how the PokéDex and broader website with its deep customization landed in its “final” state before being taken down.
The website was the home of a Public Pokémon Library and a Private Pokémon Collection, allowing registered users to share Pokémon movesets and ideas. The tool allowed users to track their own personal Pokédex online. Please tell us more about this!
nza:
Absolutely. At that time, around 2008 when it was first created, there were a couple of ideas floating around my head about Pokémon builds. I should start by saying that I have great respect for the Smogon community and what they’ve created to this day. Smogon put out the best builds and excellent explainers on usage and why certain decisions were made for each build they put out.
One of the concepts was to democratize the sharing of builds a bit more and then see how those submissions would fare, [which was] a bit of an experiment. I never did get the tool to a place where we could critique submissions and vote [on] them, but that was [the] goal. Not a far stretch from what Smogon does, but unique enough: a Reddit of builds, if you will.
The above concept, however, was really just an extension or light switch flip away from the real founding concept behind both: the Private Collection. For the PPC I had found that I was hand-writing a lot of the builds that I had made and might misplace a piece of paper and thus what the Pokémon’s IVs/EVs/notes/etc. were.
Now, I could go to the PokéDex and use the stat calculator to recalculate everything, but I wanted to be able to store and have an easy lookup for everything, including any notes I had. And wouldn’t [it] be great if when I went [to] Lucario’s PokéDex page to look up how a certain move can be learned, I [could] also have right there my own Lucario’s information? As I built up that tool, I realized all of the inputs for a competitive build you might like to share are the same. From there, the aforementioned Public Pokémon Library idea branched out naturally.
PLDH also hosted game guides, tools such as damage and stat calculators, and an archive of official and unofficial Pokémon art assets. What were some of your favourite sections of the website?
nza:
I truly love the intersectionality of art and science (see also Piet Mondrian, Cadillac, games broadly, and Pokémon specifically), and I think that showed on the website. From a pure art perspective, I could play around with ideas like putting Gyarados in Hokusai’s Great Wave of Kanagawa and making that a site banner/theme or cutting up an Ekans with a Join or Enter splash page (spin on Benjamin Franklin’s Join or Die piece). Hokusai made an impression on me, and I continued incorporating various pieces of his art into the website over the years, from the Views of Mt. Fuji series to the 100 Poems series. I had fun doing those art projects and then bringing in the history behind what I had done and writing about that.
We had other artists in the village, and they’d come up with silly sprites for the moderator team or what have you, and I liked featuring those efforts as well. So those elements of the Basics section of the site I think fondly of even now.
Continuing with the art, that section of the PokéDex was fantastic in bringing together every single sprite, official art, and any fan art that users could submit on their own in the User Submissions pages of the site. The art section of the PokéDex saw a lot of use as we would allow users to click an image and then get text generated for use on websites or forums in the form [of] embeddable HTML or BBCode, for example.
From the science side, it was certainly the PokéDex and all of the fun things that I was able to play around with, from the unique data insights that I have talked about to the customization of presenting them. I had this crazy idea that I could create an algorithm that would spit out a score for each Pokémon based on an analysis of each's comprehensive capabilities and then rank them. It worked well from a stat and typing angle and produced results that were pretty close reflections of what you would find in usage based tiering systems. It became too daunting to complete, though, when attempting to account for second-order effects from moves and abilities, so I let that project wither without publishing any of that information on the website. I think I called it TAlgo or the Tiering Algorithm.
Which other fan websites did you enjoy visiting during those early days of PLDH?
nza:
Gosh, Veekun and The Cave of Dragonflies are really top of mind. TCoD really sticks out for me as it was, and still is, such a creative and unique website. We had [been] affiliated with Butterfree’s site for a time, but I think that understandably fell off when PLDH went down in 2019. I would definitely point toward those sites that we had affiliated with, which included our old friends over at PokéJungle and Pidgi.net. We also took up a brief partnership with a musician on YouTube before our channel was banned [who] had started a project called Pokémon ReOrchestrated (PREO) that was truly fantastic listening!
I also appreciated a lot of the work that was being done over at LegendaryPkmn.net (their embeddable IV Calculator was peak at the time and [was] used on our site as well [as] Serebii’s).
Speaking of great work, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out MetalKid’s Pokémon Calculator tool: It was a really awesome Windows offline tool that you could download, and it calculated all sorts of things that eventually made their way to the online tools that we have today (not commonplace in the early Internet days). Its memory sprung on me pretty late in this interview, but that tool was a really big inspiration for me!
Of course there are the mainstays like Serebii, Smogon, Marriland, and PokéBeach that I also spent time browsing and I think are all still going fairly strong today.
To go back to those foundational websites that preceded PLDH and its creation, that had inspired me to try it out for myself, it's unfortunate that I really cannot remember them. Serebii was around and I remember Joe’s first iteration there, but the smaller fan sites, like Lugia’s Island by Silverwing, for example, I’ll also always remember. Unfortunately, it is getting harder and harder to remember the other smaller ones that have gone offline as the years fly by anymore. Trying to remember the tools we took for granted back then, [like] InvisionFree, ImageShack, etc., is its own challenge.
During its time online, PLDH had an active forum community, and it continues to have a sizable following on social media. How would you describe your community?
nza:
I was always impressed by how many unique people could come together around these video games and form bonds from that simple foundation, despite our otherwise vastly different backgrounds and lifestyles. I don’t know why I found that so impressive back then, but I still do today too.
Going back to the beginning, I will never forget this story of a member that came forward and expressed how difficult their current living situation had become. It was winter and they only had some blankets to keep warm. We managed to form a small group to get some money together and get this person some items to help get them warm and through the winter. The kind-heartedness there blew me away, as it did when we came together to help a team member when they fell ill and were hospitalized, sending care packages when familial tragedy struck others, the team helping me with hosting costs when it got difficult, and so on.
The throughline is how we all found each other in the depths of these off-the-beaten-path forums and formed bonds that have lasted nearly 20 years in some cases. One of my closest connections from those days, ThunderHero, has been on four vacations with folks from PLDH, including myself! From weddings to daily conversations, the connections made are eternal.
ThunderHero recently said on this subject, “My general takeaway […] will always be that PLDH was a family. Unlike a lot of online communities that existed, PLDH was personal for all of us in different ways, but it was the heart of why we were all there in the first place.”
One thing I noticed from our first conversation, and after learning about the history of PLDH, is that you seem to value your team and the contributions they make. What are your experiences of working with the staff of PLDH?
nza:
Yes, I am highly impressed by everyone and their willingness to jump in and contribute in their own unique ways and [feel] overwhelming gratitude [to them] for doing so. The reality is that PLDH wouldn’t still exist were it not for Ze Colonel and our ongoing social media presence. Likewise, it wouldn’t have had the kind of popularity it found without Teej’s minimalist Pokémon art going viral the way it did.
Beyond those, there are countless others like GodOfBlaze that helped to manage the initial move away from GameFAQs to InvisionFree and then disappeared into the ether shortly after [we got] our own website. From key moderators and administrators like MikkelDemey, to central figures in the battling space like Chunx, to super posters like Superfluous and Jayeljay, all the way out to the real glue of the community in ThunderHero. PLDH was what it was not because I wanted to mess around with code and cook up tools but because of folks like those that contributed, from financially contributing, to posting news, making YouTube walk-throughs, moderating, writing guides, and on and on.
I feel compelled to mention here, as I did on the website way back when, a user that went by Angel in the Silence. We got pretty close back then, and he was a well-known battler in the community, potentially even the best on the whole of the site. People ghost, but the circumstances around his disappearance struck us all as off; it wasn’t an Irish Goodbye. We scoured headlines on multiple occasions to no end. The details escape me a bit now and aren’t really for rehashing here, but I have to mention this episode as it still haunts about a half dozen of us to this day.
There is, of course, unavoidable drama that comes with community, community management, and even various communities in opposition to each other. I really don’t dwell on those periods so much, but those types of things did happen, and I can’t say they would’ve been navigable without those great souls I had around me.
Sadly PLDH fell victim to cyber-attacks and system crashes over the years, which brought the website down on several occasions. What happened, exactly?
nza:
Oh, gosh, just myriad issues over the thirteen years that the website was fully up and running before I had to nuke it in 2019. Early on, our initial host had some kind of power fault in 2008 and that corrupted our database. I was 100% still a very junior engineer and had not backed up our database as frequently as I should have. We left the host and landed on the one we still have, though [we will be] shortly leaving, but the damage was done, and we lost [a lot of] history with that event.
There were of course minor hiccups throughout the years, as I was doing things in a way I would absolutely not advise anyone [to] do these days, or even then, really: I did everything in real time. Which is to say, I had no local environment to test out what I was doing. I would make the changes and upload them to immediate effect on the live website, and I ran things that way for the first six years or so. Eventually, I’d grown enough to follow standard practice with a local test site (and stopped being [too lazy] to build a local environment) and even a staging area on the server that I could verify things on before moving over to the live site; even still, there were always hiccups throughout the ensuing years.
We used phpBB forum software for most of the website’s lifetime. In about 2016, phpBB was really a security threat all on its own, as it was easily targeted by nefarious individuals [since] it was open source and not as well maintained as it was in the decade prior. (Sadly, it’s effectively dead nowadays.) That meant if I wanted to keep any semblance of a community/forum I’d have to find a different solution, and I just never liked vBulletin’s appearance, let alone that it was quite expensive to license. So I found a newer, modern solution in Vanilla forums and we used those for a while.
Changing forums wasn’t a small chore in migrating a database either. [Affecting] all of the customization and such that we had, the whole website relied on the user session technologies that the forum software provided. It was a lot of work to move from phpBB’s technology to Vanilla’s. Ultimately the Vanilla support balloon popped and fell apart significantly faster than phpBB’s support community. Our users didn’t like the new style and system much anyways, and I was out of ideas and very low on time at that point in my life, so I walked back into phpBB and vowed to myself to stay on top of updates and vulnerabilities and manage those as best I could.
In the end, the Internet had changed astronomically from those early days in 2006, and by 2019 [it] was truly unrecognizable. During the Vanilla switch I had already noticed that there was a lot of traffic coming into the website in the form of bad requests. Which is to say, something was requesting pages that never existed, and you wouldn’t find a link from anywhere on the Internet. It was clear that there [were] some weak Denial of Service attacks going on, and they were persistent. Fortunately, our host dealt with the volume just fine, and I was able to do some work to keep those bad requests from breaking things within the site. Well, that was at least true in 2016.
Joe (aka Serebii) had posted way back in the day in response to a question about why he used static (.shtml) web pages on his website [fast page rendering and reduced server load] and [I never forgot that] explanation. I had taken a different approach, however, and learned that lesson in the most difficult way you could. The majority of the Internet is still running with active pages, queries, sessions, etc., and I think that is totally fine and doable. It requires constant maintenance and work, however. If you are going to run a simple site and don’t have countless hours to dedicate to maintenance and updates, go static.
So, I was too far down the rabbit hole of active sessions in 2019, and the attacks had escalated to the point that they were succeeding on each request, not even [due to] a period of open attacks eventually overwhelming the server but per request! I was pretty devastated, but the reality was the trouble that phpBB was bringing with it was too much, and while I attempted several mitigation pathways, I just couldn’t feasibly get a fix. For example, I had blacklisted the entire Russian IP block in 2016 to some effect. By 2019 attacks were based even in the US, and blacklisting was a game of whack-a-mole. Attempting code fixes, etc. in handling the bad requests only worked for so long as well, because ultimately the core design of the website [was] what was being attacked and stressed out, and I simply did not have the time to start from scratch and get something up quickly.
In response to the attacks necessitating bringing the site down, I initially put a pretty snarky, emotional page up that the whole of the website redirected to. It’s been edited a few times over the years but [has] largely been an old-timey white page with some black text since then lol. In early 2025, it is entirely down as we’re moving hosts, so even that simple page is broken.
While the website remains down at the time of interview, your social media accounts remain active and popular. What does the future look like for PLDH as a dedicated website and community?
nza:
Since 2019, I have had spurts of time and desire to code in my personal time. The website was largely rewritten in Python, but our host wouldn’t allow for Python to be executed on their servers. Oops! With our history with our webhost, I opted to go back to PHP but take a different approach to rendering and when queries would be done by creating a cache in real time and serving specific requests from there, easing the burden of database connections that were the crux of our downfall. That didn’t get very far because I just couldn’t bring myself to keep using PHP anymore (it’s so gross). I used it initially because it was easy to learn and the standard of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) Internet stack at that time; [additionally] it was the basis of phpBB and as [previously mentioned] facilitated our user sessions.
From there, I went back to my initial Python implementation and built on that insight Joe had unknowingly given to someone asking a simple question about static web pages: my Python implementation would run local[ly] and generate the static pages that I would then upload to the web server. Honestly, the website is about 80% complete in that operational paradigm, but I’ve missed a lot of years of new data being generated (for example, learn-sets for XY and Sun and Moon are huge sticking points for me for some reason) and collating all of that is just not super motivating for me (aside from some XY/SM holes, I’ve got everything mostly done). I am just thinking about how to bring it back but with limitations now and what those would look like. It is quite difficult.
I think that bringing it back is such a huge hurdle that if I can just bring myself to do it, even with some gaps, I’ll find the motivation to break down those final barriers to get everything back to 100%. We’re changing hosts now, but I can’t put a timeline on it just yet.
As far as what it will become or look like going forward, we've already got new art assets from Teej, and I think Ze Colonel put it best: “Art and science” is a good prompt for thinking about what PLDH is in 2025, with the forum retired. [… The] throughline to what we have today [is] what PLDH hopes to offer [as] discipline and rigor in reporting, what is hopefully insightful analysis of the series (as art, as an ever-expanding world and game design project), and the continued kindling of our shared fandom. Our community was honest, earnest, and kind. We were folks animated by the joy of connection, which I think really cuts to the core of what makes Pokémon special. Pokémon is made by folks with a real reverence and curiosity about our world – the cooperation and mindfulness needed to make it grow.
Maybe we can’t pursue it all with [the] same effort and time, but the curiosity and passion has never really waned. We’ll talk late into the night about the games, how they work, and what’s to come. We’re lifers. A portion of our brains is a Pokédex and we wouldn’t change it; instead, we’re letting it grow with us. We’re going to keep studying Pokémon, and keep searching for like-minded souls – battlers, artists, nerds, and the lore hounds – to talk Pokémon with, just like when we all first met.
We often like to ask our guests if they have some Pokémon related items or merchandise that mean something to them. Is there anything you hold dear that you would like to share with us?
nza:
Absolutely!
nza:
I love game guides and their smell. This guide is for the original and Red and Blue and was published by Nintendo Power, which, like PLDH, has gone the way of the dodo. I generally keep my books and guides in good condition, but you can tell how many nights I spent curled up playing the game with this guide next to me as a kid. Very fond memories and really the foundation for what would become PLDH and even my career. Wow!
nza:
This imported version of Pokémon Gold hits on a different level for me, as it not only represents my young attempts at struggling through attempting to learn a new language and play a game adored before it arrived in America, but also something deeper. The games have always been a place of solace and peace for me, and that was never truer than when I begged my mom to go onto this website (Play-Asia) and buy a game in a foreign language using her credit card (these were foreign concepts to parents in the year 2000)! This would not have been done under normal circumstances; however, my father had passed away just a few months prior, and she gave the purchase a thumbs up. I learned to heal in some ways with this game, and in a language that I didn’t know!
Also, I have to say, it is the best box art Game Freak has ever done.
nza:
Lastly for me are these artifacts from the 10th Anniversary Pokémon Journey Across America. The keychain went everywhere with me on a backpack through graduating from University and even into my first position in my career. It almost got lost a few times, so I stopped carrying it about.
PJAA, as it was dubbed, was the first and only Pokémon event I’d been to, and [I] felt quite like an adult making the three-hour drive to get there on my own. Aside from some swag and long lines for getting event Pokémon, there was a tournament you could [sign] up for to participate in. I competed and was matched up against a girl in the first round. After beating her I will never forget the look her father gave me, as if I had committed the ultimate sin. Having two younger sisters, I knew that look profoundly. The following match, I tanked and lost out of guilt and distress, lol. Masahiro Sakurai, of Super Smash Bros., said something that resonates quite well on the lines of a similar story, referring to it as a “bitter memory.”
nza:
I also wanted to include a single shot of memorabilia from two of PLDH’s key contributors throughout the years. Above is Ze Colonel’s and he had this to say: “A quick assemblage of some of my favorite goodies. There’s a corner of my bookshelf with a (mostly) cosmic theme, anchored by Deoxys but also populated by a few other spacey things I love, which in retrospect is another fun echo of the idea discussed elsewhere of the overlap between intellectual curiosities and fandom. Deoxys is my favorite Mythical and the patch was made by a very dope artist I follow, germi (gggermicide.bsky.social), who also has excellent taste in Pokémon. The Abra and Beldum families are my overall favorite Pokémon, so I had to include those, too. I have Sitting Cuties hidden all over the place, like a Crobat that hangs from my desk lamp – they’re dangerously easy to keep buying… And the photobomb, well, a local mischief maker.”
nza:
And last but certainly not least, we’ve got a snapshot [of] ThunderHero’s collection featuring his favorite starter: Bulbasaur, a bit off-color as it is a plush from the recent Soda collection. Alongside Bulbasaur are Pikachu sporting Lucas and Dawn garb. Of course, then, we’ve got Sceptile for the Hoenn region’s Grass starter, as it is the best type! To coincide with some of the Hoenn lore here, we’ve got The Official Frontier Battle Pass booklet, which was included in the Pokémon Emerald pre-release kit. The Dialga stylus was, likewise, part of the Diamond/Pearl pre-release kits. Elsewhere, we have some awesome cards from his collection featuring some of his other favorites, notably the hiragana Heracross which a friend obtained for him all the way over in Hawaii! I am a big fan of the centerpiece here, an old-school PokéDex! I have to say that I initially got a strong Hoenn vibe from Alex’s photo, which struck me as he’s such a strong Sinnoh fan, but ultimately, I think the collection is well balanced.
nza, thank you for taking the time to speak with Johto Times and for sharing the history of your website and community! Do you have any comments you would like to share with our readers?
nza:
I am truly appreciative of you [for] not only taking the time to feature us here and your patience with me over these last few months but for doing this for the community writ large. It is a wonderful adventure you are on here, and I love the work that you are doing with this project!
This endeavor allowed the team at PLDH and I to really dig into our memories collectively and has even lent a hand in clarifying our narrative and vision going forward.
All I can really think to share are some generic quotes that we all probably know. That said, they are cliche and widely known because they are true and none of that takes away from being reminded of them every once in a while: If I can do it, so can you. I think PLDH saved me in some ways, changed my life in others, and shined a light on what I could do with my life at a time when I wasn’t so sure I cared much for the path that I was on. [Additionally], I would say take risks and put yourself out there. This is quite a lot less impactful of a concept when it comes to the Internet than it might have been 20 years ago, but I think it still holds. We can explore and find ourselves and community here on the Internet, and I think that’s great so long as we keep things positive and constructive as Tim Berners-Lee and the academic forefathers of the Internet intended!
Thank you to Johto Times and all of the readers here <3!
Thank you to nza for taking the time to answer all of our questions! I truly hope that PLDH will return as a website and be a great source of information for Pokémon fans, continuing what it set out to do back in 2006.
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!
Good luck getting back into web design and coding! I'm always happy to hear when people from older sites are still into the community. :) also awesome collection, I have the dialga DS stylus too!
Good. Well, the second half more-so in a way.