Vol. 3, Issue 23 - Interview with Poké Center Blog
An interview with Ricardo and Rob from Poké Center Blog, a Portuguese news and resource website highlighting Pokémon information and news since December 2012. Plus, a recap of the latest Pokémon news
Welcome to Vol. 3, issue 23 of Johto Times! I would like to start by acknowledging the 180+ new subscriptions to our newsletter within the last week. To those who are new to our project, we offer a huge welcome and encourage you to check out all of the content that we have produced since we began in February 2023. You can visit the main website if you want to see interviews, features, and artifacts from Pokemon's earliest days up to the present. If you like what we do, we hope you’ll stick around and share our newsletter with your friends!
This week, we’re sharing an interview with Poké Center Blog, a Portuguese news and resource website which began in 2012. We also have a recap of the latest Pokémon news.
Last week we shared an inaccurate screenshot in our interview with Pokéverso, which showed the website as it looked in May 2021. This has now been corrected with an updated screenshot. We apologise for this mistake.
As a reminder, we are currently running a poll to determine the fans’ favourite Pokémon. Until July 31st, 2025, fans can choose six Pokémon originating from each Pokémon region, and the ten highest-ranked Pokémon in each poll will go through to a grand final in August 2025 where we will determine the overall winner. So far we have received more than 100,000 votes and we want yours, too!Check out the poll here and be sure to share it with your friends!
News
On May 30, 2025, the latest Pokémon TCG expansion “Destined Rivals” was released in English. This Team Rocket-focused set contains over 240 cards and features lots of great cards, including Cynthia's Garchomp ex and Team Rocket's Mewtwo ex. Personally, I love Ethan's Ho-Oh ex (230/182). If you are fortunate enough to pick up any products from the set, we hope you get lucky and find the cards you’re looking for!
Source: Pokémon
A quick reminder that the Nintendo Switch 2 console will launch globally today, June 5th, 2025. We look forward to what the console will mean for Pokémon in the years ahead, starting with Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition on October 16th, 2025. If any of our readers ordered one for launch day, we hope it arrived on time!
Feature: Interview with Poké Center Blog
Poké Center Blog is a Portuguese news and resource website highlighting useful Pokémon information and news. It began on December 6th, 2012, and was originally called Pokémon Daycare Center Blog. In this interview, I am delighted to speak with one of its original creators Ricardo, and its current editor-in-chief and webmaster, Rob. Read on to hear all about the history of the blog, and gain some insight into what it was like for these two guests growing up with Pokémon in Portugal.
It’s great to have you both with us for this interview! Ricardo, Rob, please introduce yourselves, and your roles at Poké Center Blog.
Ricardo: Hi, I'm Ricardo, best known as LawlietShinzo online, and I'm the manager and co-founding member of Poké Center Blog.
Rob: I'm Roberto, or Rob, known online as ShinyHunterRob, and I'm the current editor-in-chief and webmaster of Poké Center Blog.
Ricardo, you started the blog back in December 2012 on Blogspot. What motivated you to create the Poké Center Blog back then?
Ricardo: I got to meet the first and only Portuguese Pokémon Professor [a position within organized, official Pokémon Trading Card Game Leagues] at the time: João Fadário. We got to talk and realized we had a few common interests, like Pokémon and writing. Back then, Fadário had a blog of his own but he was about to give it up, 'cause he was doing it alone and it was a very complex task. We came to an agreement to start a new blog together from scratch, and thus Poké Center Blog was born as a place for all Portuguese-based trainers to come and find a safe harbor. The team started to grow soon after. Nowadays, I'm the only member from those early days still connected with the project.
Rob, you joined the team on June 29th, 2018 and have made a significant contribution to the blog. How were you first introduced to the project?
Rob: Quite honestly, I don't remember specifically. Around the time the blog was created, Pokémon X and Y were just months away from being announced and I had stepped back from the franchise, only to return when the XY anime premiered. I had “caught the bug”, so a few years later, after trying the ORAS demo at a convention, I bought a 3DS and Alpha Sapphire (I just love Hoenn), and I was back.
I started joining the community, found a few sites, among which was Poké Center Blog. I followed their stuff, and I finally met Ricardo in person at Comic Con Portugal 2016, asked him if they needed people to work on the site, and he said they did.
I tried out, got accepted, and here I am.
The core of your project is keeping readers up-to-date with the latest Pokémon news. Due to the many different products Pokémon produces, there is always a barrage of information coming out of the company, not counting its partners. How do you manage to keep on top of it all, while being as accurate as possible?
Ricardo: It's not an easy balance. Back in the day, when we started, social media was a thing, but not as prominent in people’s lives like today. People actually spent time reading news on sites like ours. Nowadays it's a bit different. People are used to consuming information in short bursts and not so much in long and complex articles like we used to do. It's also very tricky to manage truthful information with fake news. Our strategy consists [of] either receiving information from the official sources or to try our best to corroborate any piece of information that we come across. It's true that sometimes we're overwhelmed with information; Pokémon is such a massive franchise these days with so much going on, but somehow, we manage.
Rob: To be perfectly honest, we don't. We don't have either the resources nor the manpower to be able to report on all the news of all the branches [of] the Pokémon franchise. So, we've been covering the most impactful news of the franchise (main series, GO, Nintendo and Pokémon Directs, TCG and TCG Pocket). That being said, when there's a will, there's a way, and St. Arceus hasn't failed us so far.
When it comes to accuracy, "slow is fast, and fast is slow." I learned of this phrase a while ago, and it matches my views perfectly. It's my personal policy to verify as much as I can. I didn't study to become a journalist, but I have seen so many seasoned journalists getting stuff wrong and then having to retract their statements; and don't even get me started on some Pokétubers. It's our goal to make sure that Poké Center Blog is an accurate news source, and we don't do that by chasing clicks. If you take your time to do things right the first time, there will be less of a need for a second time. It’s true in journalism, true in coding, true in life.
One of the big features of Poké Center Blog was Poké Center Chatter, an online radio broadcast, dedicated to Pokémon. It was broadcast twice per week, and ran between October 2013 until May 2016. What can you tell us about this project?
Ricardo: Honestly, Chatter was the best fun I've had with this project. I'm very passionate about radio, and when the idea came about, I put my heart and soul into trying to make it a reality. Not every single idea we've had came to fruition, but this one just had to work. It was very tiring doing this project, 'cause it worked like a livestream, but I had to prepare the topics of discussion beforehand. So, on Saturdays, for instance, our broadcast was 4 hours long, but I spent a good 2 or 3 hours before that trying to prepare the broadcast. But it was a blast. And like livestreams on YouTube or Twitch, the audience could interact with us, request songs for us to play... I remember very fondly those days.
You also ran a couple of side projects, such as a magazine called MegaZine between July 2015 and January 2018, and a YouTube channel covering a range of topics in addition to Pokémon. Tell us a bit more about these!
Ricardo: MegaZine was a megalomaniac project. With a very (VERY) short staff, we tried to make a publication several pages long about video games, TV shows and movies, board games as well comics, manga and literature. We wrote about our passions, but it was a very complicated thing to do, 'cause our team is very small, so it took us sometimes months to release an issue. Poor Marcelo was the only designer we had on our team, and the project became his baby 'cause he was the one who compiled the whole thing. He was very sad when we decided to put that project to rest, but as a compromise we started a new one, called GeekStorm. Nowadays we're mostly a podcast, but back in the day it was a blog like PCB.
Our YouTube channel was called Poké Center Channel when it was launched, and our goal was to make Pokémon related videos, but soon after, it became a Nintendo-based channel. We did gameplays and game reviews from the 3DS and Wii U era. Later, when we wanted to explore a bit more than just Pokémon and Nintendo content, we changed its name to Eon Link Channel, but the essence was the same. Since I was the main creator on that channel and I felt I had to respect its essence, I started to do livestream under my own name on Twitch. Later I decided to create my own YouTube Channel and leave Eon Link Channel to be the thing it was always meant to be: the PCB YouTube page. Not much goes on there nowadays, but who knows what the future might hold…
Your blog has a following across several social media platforms. How would you describe your community?
Rob: In one word, peaceful. We haven't been cancelled yet :D.
Ricardo: Our project started for the community. We've always been community-oriented. Like I said, we wanted our blog to be felt by Pokémon Trainers as a safe harbor, that's why we've never just been a blog. Chatter, Eon Link, MegaZine, those were all projects that saw the light of day because we felt we could offer something more to every trainer out there. Want to see some gameplays? Or maybe know about some other stuff other than Pokémon? Or perhaps having a radio station tailored just for you and your liking with a community component? We had it all. Every single idea we had that we could make happen, we made happen. We started a Portuguese league where we introduced a bunch of trainers to the competitive side of Pokémon VGC in Portugal. In fact, Eduardo Cunha, the VGC World Champion in 2022, took his first step in the Pokémon Battle League (now Portugal Battle League). We started that project with our partners because we felt the community needed it. We helped a World Champion be made. It makes me very happy.
Many of our readers are from English-speaking countries, as are a huge majority of our content. So I am very interested to hear your earliest memories of Pokémon, and growing up with the franchise in Portugal. What do you remember?
Ricardo: I remember it very vividly. Pokémon came into my life when I was in elementary school. My first contact was with the anime, I only knew the games existed when Pokémon Yellow came around. It was an unbelievable craze about Pokémon nation-wide: the kids were crazy about everything Pokémon, and the parents insisted on calling it Pikachus. We were flooded by merch everywhere: in chips we had Tazos, in bubblegums we had stickers, you couldn't go to a store and not see Pokémon t-shirts, bootleg plushies were sold everywhere, soundtracks were adapted from the English version. I really think it might have been the next big thing after Dragon Ball in Portugal, honestly. Personally, I followed the anime pretty much until Pokémon Johto League Champions. From then on, I started to disconnect a bit from the anime. In the games, Pokémon Yellow was the first video game I've ever bought (Pokémon Version Jaune, the French version of the game to be more precise), but the first version I played was Pokémon Blue. I later played Pokémon Silver and since I never had a Game Boy Advance when I was younger, I only resumed my video game adventure when Pokémon Black & White came along. I later played those gen 3 and 4 games I missed, but the 5th generation was what brought me back to the franchise.
Rob: A funny thing happened in the first few days of October 1999. The anime premiered on October 2nd, 1999, and thousands of kids became enamored with Pokémon. Red and Blue released 3 days later, leading to the Portuguese version of Pokémon Fever. It exploded overnight, as I'm sure you can imagine. I was not one of those kids.
While I did watch the anime, the Pokémon Fever wouldn't catch me until the following year, when I would get Pokémon Red. On emulation. A friend of my brother told him that that new Pokémon thing had a game, and gave him an emulator and the game. Putting aside the illegality of the matter (we were kids), we had so much fun playing Pokémon Red, and that was it. We were hooked.
I am always keen to see the different types of Pokémon-related merchandise and items our guests have in their collections. What are some of your favourites that mean a lot to you?
Ricardo: I still have my very first Pokémon plushie, it's a small Pikachu that used to follow me everywhere back in the day. I really have a lot of stuff, but I only could select a couple items, I know exactly what to choose: My Cosplay Pikachu plushies (I call them Pikouple - Pikardo and Pikónia) that I bought in a Pokémon Center in Osaka on my honeymoon. I mean, you go there on your honeymoon, find a couple of Cosplay Pikachu dressed as bride and groom, how did you expect us not to buy them? It was like destiny! The other item has to be my autographed Alola region map. It's signed by Junichi Masuda and Shigeru Ohmori, the game directors for Pokémon S/M and US/UM. Back in 2016, they came to Comic-Con Portugal and I got the privilege to be in the press conference they gave at the venue as a guest from Nintendo Portugal. I was working with Nintendo at the event and I was unable to go to the autograph session they made while they were there. I stayed behind so that all my staff could attend. I was very surprised when at the end of the event, my friends from Nintendo Portugal gifted me [with] the autographed poster. A true gesture of friendship.
Rob: I have a collection of stickers from Dunkin Boomer, that I completed alongside my brother, around 2000/2001. I have some trading cards, some real, some fake (but that's another story), and I have my own Popplio, who guards my collection with a watchful, yet playful, gaze. Oh, and a Mewtwo V-Star card, which I’m pretty sure is a misprint.
What have been your highlights of working on Poké Center Blog during your involvement?
Ricardo: I think I got to do everything while on this project. Got to be around Pokémon game directors, got to work with Nintendo Portugal for over 10 years now, got to be creative, to help people discover Pokémon in all its fronts, helped a young man realize he could be a World Champion, got to interview Portuguese voice actors and other fun stuff for our radio station. I've [written] for this project, I was a (lousy) designer, webmaster, admin, PR... I really think I've done everything in PCB. I truly cannot just pick a specific episode to tell you. I gave birth to this project. Poké Center Blog is my highlight.
Rob: Apart from being interviewed by one of the best Pokémon websites out there *wink wink*, I have three.
In June 2021, I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for a Portuguese magazine regarding Pokémon and the economic value of collecting stuff. I was so excited and happy; I didn’t even care [that] they printed my name wrong.
In December 2016, during Comic Con Portugal, a journalist named Manuel Pestana interviewed Masuda and Ohmori, and made an article for a magazine about how Portugal would be great for a region, and how the Portuguese rooster would be amazing as a Pokémon. I bought the magazine, took pictures of the interview, saved them, and thought nothing of them. Jump ahead to Pokémon Day 2022, and Paldea is announced. I go, “wait… I have something about this.”, and pulled out this tweet from the archives. This tweet got me two things: my 15 minutes of fame in Eurogamer Portugal, and more importantly, I got to interview Manuel Pestana for PCB, where he gave us a background of the Masuda/Ohmori interview.
The blog will reach its thirteenth anniversary this year. I would love to know what you believe is the future of Poké Center Blog!
Ricardo: We're still working for the community. That was the past, the present and will be the future of PCB for as long as I'm managing it. I don't know where this road will take us, but it's only worth travelling it if it leads to where the community wants to go.
Rob: There are a few project ideas floating around. Our designer has some, let's say, unorthodox tastes when it comes to Pokémon storage, so he asked me to make him a Pokémon HOME guide. But "slow is fast and fast is slow", so if I make it for him, I might as well make it public, so it'll take some time. I also want to revive an old project I had back in 2017, and while I literally could drop it tomorrow, it's not up to my standards yet. Also, public-facing databases for GO and TCG Pocket. There is one other thing, which I will not tell you about, but it's something I've promised people a LONG time ago, and I've barely been able to work on it.
There's also the Artifact Project, which includes us finding and redistributing Portuguese Pokémon-themed materials, like game manuals and stuff like that, to prevent them from becoming lost media. We've been given scans or photos of the game manuals for Red, Yellow and Silver, of which only the first has been worked on. I also want to explore the Portuguese side of the franchise (I've been interested in discovering why vikings live in Vila Franca de Xira, instead of Minnesota).
Ricardo, Rob, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about your project! Do you have any closing comments you would like to make to our readers, and your own?
Ricardo: Pokémon has been in my life for a long time now. It has a very special place in my heart. It was one of the first common interests I found with my now wife. It's always great to see how this franchise has reached so many people and how many friendships were forged around it. It doesn't matter what you like: it can be the anime, or the video games or even the TCG. No matter what, if you like Pokémon, we're friends already. We might just not know it yet!
Rob: Thank you for having us on, and for giving us this chance to promote PokéCenter Blog.
Additional photographs
A huge thanks to Ricardo and Rob for answering my questions! I wish them, and the Poké Center Blog the very best of luck for the future!
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!
A lot of cards!