Vol. 3, Issue 7 - Interview with Bulbagarden
An interview with Archaic, the webmaster of Bulbagarden since 2002. The website originally launched in 1999, and has been the home of Bulbapedia since 2005. Plus, a recap of the latest Pokémon news
Welcome to Vol. 3, issue 7 of Johto Times! Today, we have a very special interview with a tremendously popular and long-running Pokémon fansite called Bulbagarden, the origins of which date back to 1999. I speak with its webmaster, Archaic, about the long history of the website, and its wiki project Bulbapedia, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this week! Plus, we have a recap of the latest Pokémon news and another Community Spotlight.
Please note: To those subscribed to Johto Times and are reading from your email, due to the length of this interview, you may find it will cut off. To read the whole thing, be sure to read the issue directly on our website.
News
A new web animation titled "Dragonite and the Postman" will be released on Pokémon Day, February 27th, 2025, via the official Pokémon YouTube channel. It is being produced by CoMix Wave Films, the studio behind such animated movies as Your Name and Weathering With You. The story features a young girl called Hana, who receives an envelope without its address, and sets out with her Pokémon, Fuecoco, to discover who sent it. The company has previously worked with Pokémon on a promotional animation called Nine Adventures, to commemorate the launch of Pokémon TCG Battle & Theme Decks.
The soundtrack for the animation will be available the same day, available on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music.
Fans will have an opportunity to obtain Pokémon TCG promo cards later this month, featuring artwork from the winners of the Pokémon TCG Illustration Contest 2024. Feraligatr, Pikachu, and Toxtricity ex will be obtainable in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
In the United States and Canada, these cards will be given away at local Pokémon Day league celebrations on February 27th. You can find your local Pokémon League using the Event Locator. They will also be available as a free gift with a purchase at select participating retailers, including stores in the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
From February 21st to December 31st, 2025, or while supplies last, customers who purchase a physical product from the Pokémon Center online store can receive a set of three cards by entering the code draw2024us for the United States, draw2024ca for Canada, or draw2024uk for orders in the United Kingdom at checkout. More details can be found through the links below!
Additionally, a promotional Eevee trading card to celebrate Pokémon Day 2025 will be given away in the United Kingdom for customers spending £29.99 or more on Pokémon TCG products at the Pokémon Center store or from other participating retailers. I was unable to confirm if this promotion is taking place outside of the UK at the time of writing, so it might be worth checking with your local retailer to see if they're offering a similar promotion.
Source: Pokémon (US), Pokémon (UK), Bulbagarden, Pokémon
DeNA, the co-developer of Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, has seen their profits increase by over 8000%, thanks to the release of the game. In their latest investor report (third quarter), they confirm that Pokémon TCG Pocket played a major contribution. The company also confirmed that they are planning updates and other measures to ensure the game is enjoyed long term.
Feature: Interview with Bulbagarden
Bulbagarden is a Pokémon fan website and community which was created in 1999 by Chris Kaleiki. During its earliest days, and since it was relaunched in 2002 (Kaleiki left the site in 2001), Bulbagarden has established itself as a well-known and trustworthy source of Pokémon information and news on the web, and a gathering place for one of the oldest Pokémon fan communities. It is home to Bulbapedia, a wiki which functions as one of the leading resources of Pokémon information, covering a wide range of details about the series. Since 2002, Bulbagarden has been headed by Archaic, who kindly agreed to an interview with Johto Times!
Thanks for agreeing to this interview with Johto Times, Archaic! Please introduce yourself and tell us about your website!
Archaic:
You’re welcome. =) Thanks for inviting me, and for being so patient with me over these past months as we tried to get this all sorted. ^^;
Hi everyone. I’m Archaic, webmaster of Bulbagarden since 2002, and a member of the online Pokémon fandom since...I guess it must have been late December 1998. I’m generally a pretty private person, but I can tell you that I’m Australian and have lived here in Brisbane, Queensland, for most of my life. I also lived for a year in Nagoya, Japan back in the early 2000s. I’m old enough now that I’m really growing into the username that I selected more than a quarter of a century ago, and currently have enough health issues that I’m basically a walking stereotype — literally, as I walk with a cane these days.
Outside of Pokémon, I work as a marketing consultant and part-time academic. I did my PhD on consumers' privacy protection and self-disclosure behaviours in social media. I’ve also been involved in activism around privacy and digital rights, including as a board member of two separate not-for-profit NGOs [Non-Governmental Organisation].
As for Bulbagarden itself... well, our tagline is “The Original Pokémon Community”. Our community goes all the way back to 1999. The original Bulbagarden.com was created under Chris “Bulba” Kaleiki, who’s probably better known these days as a former game designer for World of Warcraft. I’ve been running Bulbagarden since December 2002, when I resurrected the site with Chris’s permission after it had gone under in the big dot-com crash.
While we’re best known today for the Bulbapedia, which launched to the public on Valentine’s Day 2005, we also have the oldest Pokémon forums in continual operation (with posts dating all the way back to December 29th, 2002), our Discord server, and dedicated teams for Pokémon news, social media, and streaming.
We’d love to hear about your earliest memories of Pokémon! How were you introduced to the series?
Archaic:
My introduction to the franchise was actually through the anime! I caught the very first episode when it aired on CheezTV on Channel 10 here in Australia in October 1998, and I was instantly hooked. I'd never heard about the franchise before, but I noticed Nintendo being mentioned in the end credits. I'd always been a big Nintendo fan, so that pushed me to go out and learn more about the franchise. I think I ended up getting Pokémon Blue for Christmas that same year, and then the rest was history.
Bulbasaur’s Mysterious Garden was the original name for the website, derived from the Pokémon anime episode of the same name. How did you first get involved with the community?
Archaic:
So my very first experience with the Bulbagarden community was, of all things, as a raider. Up until that point, I'd primarily been a member of the UPNetwork forums. I can't remember what exactly set it off, but at one point a large group of shippers from various groups (mostly PokéShippers and PalletShippers) basically went and raided the Bulbagarden Forums, signing up in a big group and spamming up the anime forum with a ton of shipping related posts over the course of a weekend or so, up until the point most of us had been banned or temp banned.
It wouldn't be until months later that I properly returned to the Bulbagarden Forums, right around the time that UPNetwork collapsed. I continued posting mostly around the anime forum there, and when Chris (known to us all then as Bulba; he didn’t take on that Anenga name until years later when he tried to launch that as a separate website project) posted something about looking for people to help with news, I applied. I became the Australian News Correspondent, mostly posting about things like product and store promotions and competitions (stuff like Pokémon toys in cereal and Happy Meals), free-to-air TV schedules for Pokémon and other anime, and the like. Within a couple of months, I was made a moderator for the Anime forum, largely on the basis of the activity I'd been able to generate there, and was later promoted to admin on the basis of the activity I'd brought to the forum with the Pokémon Anime Style Battling League (BG PASBL), quickly becoming de-facto head admin by virtue of being the only active admin (or at least, the only one who hadn’t drifted away from the franchise).
What kind of website was Bulbagarden in its younger days in the early 2000s under Chris’s leadership?
Archaic:
Looking back, I’d probably say the two things that stand out to me in comparison to how things are today are that it was a bit more of a Wild West in terms of what was allowed, and there was also less of a distinction and separation between individual users and the moderators. But then, I think that would go for most fan forums of the time, outside of those run by large companies.
I don’t really want to ramble on about how toxic the old internet was in retrospect (even if it might not have seemed that way to a lot of us at the time), so let’s just focus on the lack of barriers between users and staff. Being a moderator back then felt like less of a mechanical role, in the sense of responding to user reports and issuing warnings and bans, and more of a social role, acting as both a leader of the community, and as an active member of it. While some people may have idolized their moderators as larger-than-life figures, they were also frequently seen as approachable people who you could interact with, rather than someone totally distant from you. It wasn’t uncommon back then to see cliques spring up around certain moderators, and for users to follow their fave moderators when a site went down and they had to find a new community.
If I had to identify a reason for why things were like that, it’d probably be because of how young we all were back then, and for how little time the online community for the franchise had really been a thing to begin with. Most of us were still in high school, and it wasn’t unknown for some particularly precocious kids in late primary school (or early middle school by American standards) to be given a mod position. It’s a lot harder for there to be a huge perceived chasm between your mods and other community members when even the oldest members have only been around for a year, as opposed to today where we have people who’ve built their reputations in the community over a period of time longer than some members of the community have been alive.
Despite its growth and popularity, the website went through a period of uncertainty in the early 2000s when it couldn’t pay its hosting bills. At the time, you stepped in to try and save the community. Can you tell us about what it was like for you and the team in this period of Bulbagarden’s history?
Archaic:
At that point, you could probably divide the staff into two groups. A bunch of people who'd lost interest in Pokémon but who hung around because all their online friends were there, known as the "Classic Members", and a smaller group of people who remained big Pokémon fans who wanted the community to remain around. The first group, which included all of the other admins, mostly went over to Chris's nascent Anenga forums. As for the rest of us, we'd all used the forums as our primary contact point, and it made it incredibly difficult to coordinate things. While we had each other on our Instant Messenger friend lists, we were spread out over so many time zones, so that wasn't the most effective way to stay in touch, especially when a lot of us were still in high school then and couldn't just get on at any time of day.
I'd managed to stay in contact with Chris through IMs, and as the only active admin interested in trying to keep the community going it basically fell to me to try and organise something to get us back off the ground. Top of my mind was trying to raise enough to pay for one final month of the current server, so that we could get access to back up the forums database. I figured that so long as we had that, we had the chance of coming back one day. In the end though, there was just no way a bunch of mostly high schoolers, most of whom had never even worked a part time job, let alone had savings, could possibly raise enough in time. To further complicate matters, a lot of people seemed to have given up on us before we'd even tried. At this point, Bulba was the third of the Big Four to die, after Abode and UPN. The internet was a lot younger then, and a lot of people were just viewing it as a natural process of rise and fall of online communities. So long as there were still other communities for them to move to, they didn't really see it as a problem.
And so the servers died, and with them basically everything that hadn't been cached in someone's browser history or by the web archive, or that Chris hadn't backed up himself at some point in the past (and as we later discovered when bringing the site back, Chris’s own backups were partially corrupted, so that wasn’t all that much). Sadly, that included the forums database, and with it years of history from the early fandom.
Bulbagarden was originally known as one of “the Big Four”, which described some popular and well managed Pokémon fan communities: UPNetwork, The PokéMasters, Pokémon Abode, and Bulbagarden. What was the relationship between the websites like?
Archaic:
I think only two of the Big Four were left by the time I first became a mod anywhere, so it's difficult for me to answer this from a staff perspective. By that point, when it was just Bulba and The PokéMasters (TPM), I don't think there was much [of a] relationship left. Most of us mods didn't have the direct contact details of our counterparts on the other forums, so it's not like there was a lot of actual cooperation or collaboration. So many of the admins on both sites by that point were largely inactive, or had ceased caring about Pokémon.
If I was to speak from a user perspective though, even at the height of the "Big Four" in early 1999, there wasn't really much [of a] relationship at all. You had the "Anti-Spammer Alliance" thing at the top of the forums’ main pages, which may as well just have been a set of affiliate links, and that was about it in terms of official relationship. In terms of the relationship between the communities of users though... I'd say they were intensely tribal. It was the height of the console war era, and we were all still kids and teens, and people supported their favourite sites like people might support their favourite sporting teams.
I do know that Chris (Bulba) and Jaxel (UPN) had a good relationship with each other at least, though again as a user I don't think that was readily apparent at the time. I presume most of those site owners got along, or at least were cordial enough with each other to co-operate to some extent, but I really couldn't [speak] to how deep that co-operation actually went.
In the earliest days of the fan community, thousands of enthusiast websites were created, ranging from simple tributes to established and well trusted sources of curated information on the Pokémon franchise. What other Pokémon fan websites have you enjoyed visiting over the years?
Archaic:
There’s been so many Pokémon communities over the years [that] I’ve probably forgotten about more communities than currently exist. ^^;
There’s been so many sites that I’ve visited over the years that if I were to name them all we’d be here forever. If I had to name a few specific ones, I guess outside of Bulba the standouts in terms of places I was really active on for extended periods would be:
The original UPNetwork Forums. They were where I really started to hit my stride in the online Pokémon fandom and where I made a name for myself amongst the anime fans and the shippers.
The Pokémasters Forums ended up as the hub of the shipping community after UPNetwork and Bulbagarden both died, so I kind of ended up there by default.
For a time, the Serebii Forums. It may surprise people to know that at one point, I basically worked as Joe Merrick’s right-hand man. Of course, I’ve not been back there in almost two decades at this point. For various reasons, Joe and I just don’t get along, and I made the decision a number of years ago to basically pull back from interacting with him as much as possible to avoid any unnecessary conflict.
PokéGym. During the period in 2006-2007 where I was heavily into the TCG, I was quite active here in the Deck Building forum. I’m sure there’s at least a few players from that time who remember me talking up my success with Mercury (Gardevoir/Starmie δ) in the Aussie competitive scene at the time.
On February 14th, 2005, a new project by Bulbagarden went online called Bulbapedia, a user-edited wiki which has grown to become the largest English-language Pokémon wiki. With over 56,000 articles at the time of interview, Bulbapedia is an important resource for Pokémon fans to learn a wealth of information related to the series. How did the idea for it come about?
Archaic:
In the time it’s taken me to get all these answers together, it’s already long since passed 54,000 articles, and with certain upcoming news items likely to expand things, it will probably be well past 55,000 articles by the time this interview is published. ^^;
It's hard to credit the idea of Bulbapedia to any one specific thing. I guess if I had to go back to its genesis, Chris's Anenga website concept was structured around a wiki-based content management system called TikiWiki, where the core idea was that people who had a strong interest in a particular topic could readily contribute content and news. From memory, he hadn’t really considered applying it to Bulbagarden at the time, though. Or not as an independent entity, anyway – I think he probably intended long term to fold Bulbagarden into Anenga if it took off.
In mid-2004, Bulbagarden was honestly struggling a bit. While we'd been able to bring back the forums and successfully rebuild the community, we'd struggled in developing any sort of website content. In particular, we didn’t have our own Pokédex, which was basically seen as the bare minimum of what we should have. The biggest problem we had wasn't getting the information, but rather the bottlenecks involved getting it nicely formatted for web pages and then uploaded. We had a staff who were familiar with forums and BB code, but who largely didn't really have much in the way of web development knowledge and experience.
We'd looked [at] a variety of different content management systems which might help to alleviate those issues, and it was in doing so that we started thinking about wikis again. Wikia [now Fandom] didn't yet exist (though it would launch later that year, before we launched Bulbapedia), but several of us had taken notice of the growth of Wikipedia, and we started thinking about how we might adapt the concept to a fansite. Wikicode seemed at the time like it’d be a lot less intimidating to people coming from forum BB code than HTML or PHP was, and it seemed like both the perfect way to deal with the bottlenecks we had and a way to get the broader community more involved and invested in researching and updating information.
What probably sealed the deal, though, was when Meowth346 decided to close Pokémon Forever. We had a good relationship with them, and after approaching them they agreed to bequeath their Pokédex and games data to us. This became the initial core of the Pokémon species pages on Bulbapedia for our public launch.
One of the biggest challenges with a wiki is ensuring that the information presented is accurate, credibly sourced, and up to date. What does Bulbapedia do to ensure that is the case?
Archaic:
Well, I’d say that’s probably two separate problems, to start.
As far as ensuring things are accurate and credibly sourced, I’d say it’s a combination of moderation, lots of moderation, and community involvement.
Honestly, though, that side of things isn’t quite as big of a challenge as you might think most of the time. You get your occasional trolls, sure, but someone maliciously altering pages doesn’t tend to do so in a way that won’t be noticed. So these trolls don’t really cause any long-term problems, just the digital equivalent of a clean-up in aisle 7. In the past, there were huge concerns about people adding flawed information about recently released games that would lead us to lock the wiki to editing whenever a main series title launched, but that hasn’t really been a problem for a number of years now. For that matter, with how quickly this information actually circulates around at this point, fact-checking is a lot less of a hassle than it once was. We’re no longer in the days of relying on small groups of people buying Japanese strategy guides to input the data ahead of an international release six months later.
So really, one of our biggest challenges today on the accuracy front is dealing with old information. Both in the sense of:
a) information that was added years ago, when editors weren’t as experienced with the wiki format and expectations regarding sourcing weren’t as developed or as rigorously enforced, and
b) information about things from a long time ago that wasn’t ever covered to the extent we would’ve liked.
Both of these honestly fall under the banner of “something that just gets worked on over time as things crop up”, and both are things where the big leaps forward can as easily come from regular users as they can from our staff.
With the first of these... in a project that will be twenty years old in February 2025, it’s basically impossible that there won’t be some errors somewhere. That's true for any website, not just wikis. With the volume of new content coming out, we don’t really have the people to spare to be intentionally going through every single article to try and hunt these out ourselves. But that’s the beauty of the wiki format: Errors don’t rely on just one person to fix them; anybody who spots them can make the correction. Though that can sometimes be a double-edged sword too. I’ve lost count now of how many times a well-intentioned user decided to “correct” something on Bulbapedia because another fansite said something different to us, only for us to have to change it back because the other fansite was the one with incorrect information there. But then, that’s where the moderation comes in.
As for the second, well, that’s probably a challenge that won’t be resolved for a very long time, if ever, though we’ll continue chipping away at things as best we can. Finding credible sources for some of this content, particularly old merchandise, can be exceptionally challenging, and it’s not helped by how few companies have maintained public records about some of these products. But new-old things are always being unearthed all the time, and something as simple as finding an old product still in its original packaging or with its original tags can open up multiple new avenues that we may not have realised even existed beforehand. And again here, this is something where big contributions can be made by users who’ve run into something, rather than things only happening because a Bulbapedia Admin had a lucky encounter at a thrift shop or convention. So the important thing here for us is just making sure that people can contribute this information when these opportunities do present themselves.
As for keeping things up-to-date, now that’s a separate kind of challenge. Every part of the Pokémon franchise is different, with different requirements for what kind of information is needed, and with information coming in about new things at different rates. New release game information is of course the biggest burden to deal with. Whereas in the past we would have those months after the Japanese release to collate everything before it came out internationally, nowadays we’re often scrambling to get a lot of information up the same day a game comes out. As with any wiki, though, the more hands we have working on that, the easier the work tends to go in the long run. Most new pages created on Bulbapedia are a collaboration of multiple people in the background, from people translating Japanese text and uploading and tagging the images, through to those working on templates for tables and infoboxes and inputting the actual wikicode for the page.
Bulbapedia is an ongoing project that is constantly growing with each passing year. What are some of your long-term goals for it?
Archaic:
It probably goes without saying that the longest-term goal is, of course, just to continue to be here forever for the fandom.
Bulbapedia's primary mission is to accurately document both the Pokémon source material, and the community experience of Pokémon fans and the Pokémon fandom when interacting with that material. So long-term, in furtherance of that mission, I’d like to see us build up more documentation of merchandise, which historically has not seen as much attention as other areas of the franchise, and of the Pokémon fandom itself. So things like coverage of the history of the franchise and fandom, of real world events and tournaments, and of prominent members of the competitive scene and the broader community of Pokémon fans. I fully expect a number of those sorts of articles, particularly those dealing with some of the old fandom history, will end up using quite a few Johto Times citations.
It’s maybe not exactly a long-term goal, given that we’ve actually got a few things already in progress there, but one of the other things I’d really like for us to do is to find ways that people could more easily work with us to build on our database of information. Though I suspect we’re not ever going to be able to have a fully public API simply due to concerns about abuse, especially by AI bots (and that’s already been a massive problem for us over the past 18 months), I believe we should be able to do limited and specific access for certain projects, and/or to host open-source tools that people might create directly on the Bulbagarden domain and/or in the new Bulbagarden app (which should be launching sometime in February 2025). The biggest bottleneck at our end here, though, is some rather major work that first needs to be done on our backend, and while that project has made a lot of progress over this past year, it’s still very much in development.
On the official Bulbapedia page for the website, it states that there was a period of low activity following the end of the original series of Pokémon and the release of Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire. Please tell us more about how that impacted the website and the morale within the team at the time.
Archaic:
So just to give some context for your readers, Bulbagarden re-launched in late December 2002, right in the middle of the hype cycle for Ruby & Sapphire, which had just been released in Japan [that] November, and which would come to the West between March and July [of] the following year. I'd say we managed to leverage that to rapidly rebuild the forum community, even as the website itself languished without much content.
To an extent, I think the low activity after the Ruby & Sapphire launch had died down, so from mid-to-late 2003 through to the international release of FireRed and LeafGreen in 2004, was something that was more a reflection of the broader fandom at the time, rather than just of our website itself. Whereas today there's a constant stream of new things coming out for Pokémon across console and mobile games, the anime, and the TCG, back then things were a lot more spread out. Anime fans could be stuck for long periods of time without any new episodes airing in their local area, and they might be months behind other fans, making it harder for everyone to discuss things week-to-week. And even when we did get new episodes, well, they were mostly “filler” episodes. We went basically a whole year at one point between new gym battles. Gaming fans into competitive battling, meanwhile, needed to venture into IRC to use things like RSBot, which could be incredibly intimidating to those not technically inclined, and this likely created a huge barrier to entry for younger fans. In certain countries, TCG fans had a little more luck with continuing releases and local leagues, but in other countries it could be a lot harder to get your hands on product or find people to play with.
It was also around that time that certain parts of the fandom were tending to become more monolithic, such as with the TCG’s competitive community at the time being concentrated into places like The PokéGym, so any activity with that group wouldn't be reflected with commensurate activity in the TCG sections of the large generalist communities.
So during that time period... I don't think that the lack of a website necessarily had a massive, direct impact on our team's morale. That’s not to say it wasn’t an ongoing annoyance, but for most of the team it was probably more of a ‘someone else’s problem’ thing, since they were busy focusing on their own responsibilities as forum moderators, etc., and weren’t necessarily involved directly in trying to get a website up. Any downturn in morale was more just a reflection of a reduced amount of enthusiasm for the franchise as a whole, with many older members of the fandom having moved on. Heck, I recall that Joe Merrick during this time (mid-2004-ish) even briefly considered selling Serebii or just closing it down outright. If I hadn’t been a poor exchange student at the time and I’d actually had the money for his asking price, a lot of things might have gone very differently.
As for my own morale... Well, at that time I was an exchange student living in Nagoya, Japan. I had new anime episodes every week, FireRed and LeafGreen came out days before my arrival in the country, and I bought Emerald the very first day I could get to the local Pokémon Center after it launched later in the year. So despite my own frustrations with not getting the website together (and some health issues that ended up putting me in a Japanese hospital for the better part of a month), my own morale was through the roof. ^^;
Thanks to Bulbapedia, Bulbagarden rapidly grew in popularity once more. What was it like to see your efforts to rebuild the community come to fruition?
Archaic:
Gratification. Relief. Vindication. There were a lot of doubters at first, and there’s certainly been more than a few over the years who outright hoped to see us fail, but we’re still here and still going strong.
Since 2002, Bulbagarden has had an active forum community with over 62,000 members at the time of interview and almost 7.5 million posts since it was opened publicly on January 1st, 2003. How would you describe the community?
Archaic:
Right now, I’d probably describe our forum community as modest but close-knit. They certainly aren’t anywhere near as active as they once were, which is a huge shame, but that’s not something that’s limited to just Bulba. It’s my hope that long term, as the enshittification of social media continues, we may see forums make a resurgence as people look to escape the toxicity with more moderated communities like our own. That day is probably still a ways off yet, given the recent trend has been less for people to leave social media and more for them to try and find new social media platforms which haven’t been ruined yet. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens there.
The majority of our community these days are instead interacting with us through Discord. One thing I’ve really loved to see over the past few years is how much more direct, off-wiki interaction Discord has been able to facilitate between Bulbapedia Admins and users. Between things like that, and recent projects such as the Bulbapedia Bulletin Board, I think we’ve been able to give new users a lot more assistance and direction in contributing to the wiki than we have in the past, and it’s created a much more cohesive community around the wiki as a result.
Bulbapedia is a large responsibility, even with support. Not only is there the wiki and forums, but also several other core projects such as chat and social platforms, news, and an archive. How have you managed all of these different projects with your team, and what are some of the challenges you have faced?
Archaic:
There's really only one answer to that: a large and dedicated team of volunteers. It's simply not something that a single person, or even a small group of people, could hope to possibly manage. I don't think many people outside the site necessarily realise just how many people we have on the team (roughly 120 at last count), or how long some of them have been with us. My right-hand and Chief of Staff, evkl, was part of the team when we re-launched in December 2002. Our Discord Head Admin, Misty, wasn’t part of that initial staff, but he and I knew each other going back to the PokéShipper days, and he'll be having his 20th staff birthday fairly soon. Heck, a decent number of the team have been with us for more than a decade at this point, like Kogoro, Enzap, Maverick Nate, MAGNEDETH, SnorlaxMonster, and abcboy, just to name a few. There’s also more than a few who only joined the team more recently but who first joined the community over a decade ago as well, or who spent time away from the team before coming back.
Honestly, my biggest regret over the years is that a lot of our volunteers probably don’t get anywhere near as much credit and respect as they deserve for all the hard work they do, and that many of your readers probably aren’t familiar with many of the names I just mentioned. Back in the old days of the Pokémon fandom, the people writing content for each website were also the forum moderators, and with those forums being such hives of activity there was a lot more public visibility for them. Today, though, with there being much more division of the work, that’s no longer the case, and I think for a long time many members of our team simply weren’t visible to most users, especially if they were responsible for things which were more behind the scenes, like working on page templates. To an extent, I think that’s starting to change thanks to Discord and things like the ‘What’s GROWING On’ articles we put out every month. Whereas in the past the only interactions most people would have with wiki admins were if there was a problem of some kind, nowadays there’s a lot more opportunity for that direct interaction and getting to know the team.
When you’ve got such a large team of volunteers, like we do, there’s obviously going to need to be some structure to things. I guess to some extent I was probably predisposed to organizing things in that sort of way, if only because my undergrad degree was in business. ^^;; A big influence, though, would have also been my experiences back when I worked on other sites. Every single site I’d been involved in had been fairly organized for the mod team across all the different areas, and the more people there were, the more structure there was. Having a clear structure to keep things neat and organized just always made sense to me.
As for my working relationship with our various teams, I have to admit it’s not always been the smoothest. While I’d prefer not to spend a lot of time dwelling on past mistakes, probably the biggest challenges we have had over the years are where conflicts emerged within the staff team. While I’ve been extremely hands-on with things on Bulba since moving on from my former academic career during the height of the pandemic, between the start of 2012 (when I began my PhD studies) and mid-2020 I was much more hands-off on a lot of things. Working 80+ hours in an average week in my academic career simply didn’t leave me with much time for any other pursuits. But that also meant that I ended up at something of a distance from most of our team for a number of years, something which only really started turning around after I was able to start being more hands-on again. In retrospect, I can’t help but compare those years to how Pokémaster Kevin was back with the old TPM, towards the end. People (mostly) knew who he was, and that he was in charge, but he never seemed to be around and instead everything kind of filtered down through Little Pikachu. Today, I think we’re in a much better place, but it’s taken a whole team effort to get there.
I would like to hear your take on some of the controversies that have occurred over the past few years that have been talking points within the Pokémon fan community. One of these was Dexit, the exclusion of many Pokémon from Generation 8 titles. What were your thoughts on that?
Archaic:
I might get some hate for this, but I always found Dexit to be unnecessarily overblown. The fact of the matter was Dexit wasn't the first time that Game Freak had decided to leave out some Pokémon (that was Ruby & Sapphire), and I fully expect it won't be the last time either. Just like with Ruby & Sapphire, I assumed from the beginning that the Pokémon they'd left out would return eventually. My attitude was, as it’s always been, it's a new region so just use the new Pokémon. If it disrupts your competitive team, well, too bad. TCG players have to deal with rotations all the time, so it's not like it's only the video games where this happens.
At the time with Dexit, I felt like the main reasons it became such a big deal were that:
a) It was the first time that people who had joined the fandom from the late GBA generation onwards got to experience this happening, with people having become accustomed to having the full National Dex available in every video game.
b) It was the first time this happened after social media in the modern sense had really taken off.
c) The nature of gaming and geek journalism had changed, in part thanks to how huge social media has become in society, and the large gaming news sites were much more incentivised to cover the community reaction and fan the flames of that as they chased clicks.
Probably the biggest issue, though, became that people got the impression that the change had been made due to a perceived incompetence or laziness on the part of Game Freak, as opposed to it being an intentional decision for gameplay and/or marketing purposes. Not that most people would've responded well to an underlying marketing reason either, given how history has judged Hasbro for them doing effectively the same thing back in the day with The Transformers, where they killed off Optimus Prime and all the other popular characters in The Transformers Movie in order to introduce a whole new set of toys for kids to buy. But at least then people might have understood there was a clear rationale for the company doing it, even if it was a rationale they disagreed with, as opposed what instead went around the fandom with people feeling Game Freak simply weren't putting enough effort into making new HD 3D models.
At the time of interview, the latest mainline Pokémon titles are Scarlet & Violet. Despite being a commercial success, the games have been criticised for their performance issues. What is your opinion on this?
Archaic:
As I see it, the technical issues with Scarlet & Violet were really just the culmination of issues going back many years, that were a direct result of Game Freak having been pressured to put out new main series titles at an unsustainably fast pace. Since the release of the games though, Game Freak seems to have taken concerns about these issues on board and is slowing the pace of releases somewhat to allow them to give their games better polish. So long as that ends up being more than just words, then I feel they’re on a good path to resolve these going forward. In a way, really, this is a case of Game Freak just going through the pains of the HD transition later than other game studios. With the lack of Pokémon games on Wii U that they were directly involved in, the Switch has effectively been their first HD console, and the main series generations on it have been their first forays into open-world game design and development. They’re essentially having to learn things that other publishers grappled with multiple console generations ago, back when Nintendo’s rivals first went HD. From that perspective, the fact that they’ve had teething pains, especially while they’ve been on that rapid schedule of pumping things out, is hardly a surprise.
Honestly, though, I do think a lot of these technical issues get a bit overblown, which may be in part due to lingering dissatisfaction from sections of the fandom over things like Dexit. Here, I’d compare Pokémon to games like Skyrim, which has had its own significant technical issues that linger to this day despite many remasters and re-releases. There’s plenty of playful ribbing of those games and their issues, sure, but that stands in stark contrast to what Pokémon has received in terms of outright vitriol and declarations of things being “unplayable” from various groups. It’s just ridiculous. I don’t want to unjustly tar everyone who’s upset with these graphical issues with the same brush, because there certainly are plenty of people who have been able to express their displeasure and disappointment with those in an appropriate way, but there are also far too many people who were all too willing to engage in the kind of behaviour and language that we as a fandom should feel ashamed to be associated with.
Should Game Freak have worked on Scarlet & Violet (and Legends: Arceus before it) a little more before releasing them? Sure, I can wholeheartedly agree with that. But I also suspect that if they did, you’d probably be asking me a question about the games having attracted criticism for being delayed instead.
The popularity and demand for the Pokémon TCG has grown massively in recent years. While this has eased recently, it was difficult for fans to obtain products, and online scalping left the target audience struggling to acquire cards. What are your feelings around this topic?
Archaic:
The level of profiteering on the secondary market around this game is a continuing source of frustration for me.
During COVID, it was understandable to an extent why there was such difficulty getting cards into the hands of both kids and adult players. There was absolutely a spike of people returning to the cards out of nostalgia while they were all stuck in lockdown, causing a surge which would have likely led to shortages even without scalpers attempting to profiteer off things, simply from the lead times required to ramp up production. Adding the scalpers on top of that just made things insane.
We have to remember that the majority of people playing and collecting the TCG cards are not highly involved adult fans purchasing from dedicated card game stores; they’re kids whose parents buy them packs of cards from EB Games (that’s GameStop to you Americans), big box department stores, and Amazon. Or, to put it another way, the majority are the kinds of people who mostly buy by the booster, with the occasional special collection, not by the booster box. By the same token, these days, the stuff being scalped hardest often isn’t the stuff that interests the hardcore adult fans who play competitively; it’s the promotional cards that interest kids and adult collectors. And if you’re one of those adult collectors, I’d like to hope you have at least a bit of self awareness that perhaps you shouldn’t buy up everything to the point where you’re ruining the fun for the kids. If we want this fandom to continue on for decades more, those kids need to have the same kinds of wonderful memories of Pokémon as they grow up as we all did, and they’re not going to have that if they only ever remember stores being sold out.
I think one of the most frustrating incidents that happened over the past few years was when you had those McDonald's promotional cards being distributed with Happy Meals during the pandemic. Before the promotion had even officially started, you had entire cases of unopened packs of these cards showing up on eBay, and while stores eventually implemented controls to prevent people from buying too many, you still saw many stores only loosely enforcing those if at all. Here in Australia, I recall that they continued to allow the toys to be purchased separately from a Happy Meal or any other purchase, meaning scalpers could just go around to multiple stores and buy up to the maximum number of packs with each transaction, before dumping them on eBay by the bag load.
The stuff that happened with the Van Gogh Museum was just as frustrating. Even putting aside that several of the staff members of that museum worked with the scalpers and ended up getting fired... we know that Pokémon, as a brand, is aware of the problem its customers encounter with resellers. Pokémon, having that knowledge, thus has a responsibility to their fans to prevent scalpers. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that promotional goods and associated merchandise are produced in sufficient quantities to satisfy demand, such that scalpers aren’t able to profiteer. It’s like... remember all those stories people used to make up where they claimed Nintendo was intentionally under-shipping Wii consoles to artificially boost hype and build demand? Those stories were a complete fabrication (ironically enough, I'm given to understand that Sony did that for their consoles, but Nintendo never did), but the feelings those stories left with people are the same kinds of feelings we have now in seeing how easily scalpers continue to be able to take advantage of these things. What’s the point of building hype and demand over something if you won’t be able to satisfy it? It’s not as if The Pokémon Company sees any of the obscene profits that the scalpers get. It just results in people feeling like The Pokémon Company doesn’t care.
What changes and improvements would you like to see The Pokémon Company and its partners make to benefit fans?
Archaic:
Coming down to it, I guess all the things I’d like to see really boiled down to just one core principle. I personally feel like there needs to be less separation between Pokémon in Japan and Pokémon around the rest of the world. A global brand should have proper global brand management, not the fragmented multi-domestic approach it sometimes feels like we have today. Things like Pokémon TCG Live only being available for people in countries managed by The Pokémon Company International, and not for countries where the brand is managed by The Pokémon Company directly, simply makes no sense with how the communities within this fandom interact with each other. Even for things like the recently released TCG Pocket, there’s still a degree of weird separation, with the official English language social media for the app lagging behind the Japanese account to the degree that events have already started well before the English account even acknowledges them.
So, for example, the fact that the mainline Pokémon animated series still isn’t officially available outside of Japan with the original Japanese audio track and subtitles is a huge frustration to me, as someone whose connection to the franchise started through that part of the fandom. When other Japanese franchises that target children like Pretty Cure have had no problems doing exactly this via platforms such as Crunchyroll, it just mystifies me that Pokémon can’t extend this courtesy to the fans who are interested. It’s not as if these various streaming platforms don’t make any technical restrictions here irrelevant. Take something like last year’s Paldean Winds. That aired simultaneously on the Japanese and English YouTube channels, but they didn’t even give an English dubtitles option, let alone proper subtitles. While I could understand to some extent why old licensing agreements and so forth might present legal barriers to doing this with older material, particularly with how much of a mess rights issues can be with things like music, it’s just silly that this hasn’t been a consideration for brand new material being created explicitly for global consumption. They proved it could be done with Pokémon Concierge on Netflix, so the issue seems more a matter of will to do it at The Pokémon Company’s end. Hopefully they got enough statistical data from that Netflix launch to convince them it’ll be worth it for future releases. We did recently see a POKÉTOON episode on the Japanese YouTube channel with full official subtitles, so I live in hope.
Similarly, while Pokémon has been getting better at this, it still annoys me how much Pokémon merchandise is still effectively Japan-only. I understand there’s going to be some historical factors at play here, like merchandising agreements and regional licenses that in some cases can probably be traced back to contracts originally negotiated in the 1990s, but there’s a lot of things that would probably do quite well overseas that today are only accessible to fans are willing to pay the markups and shipping costs. I can only hope that, as Pokémon Center stores become available in more countries (and with local warehouses – shipping is stupidly expensive for the Australia and New Zealand stores right now thanks to them being shipped from the US), and as some of those old contracts expire, we might start to see more improvement.
We’ve spoken about the controversies and changes you think would improve the franchise and its community, but what are some of the positive aspects that you have witnessed over the years that have made you feel great about Pokémon and its fans?
Archaic:
So one thing that immediately comes to mind is the friendliness and easy camaraderie that we always see among Pokémon fans at any sort of live gathering or event. I don’t really play Pokémon GO these days, but I still remember what it was like those first few months after the game launched, with everyone helping each other out. There was something really special about those ad-hoc gatherings. Where we lived at the time wasn’t exactly a place where the average person got to know their neighbours, but for that wonderful brief moment in time, it felt like the entire community had been brought together through Pokémon. To this day, the only larger gatherings of Pokémon fans I’ve been present for have been major official events like regional tournaments, and while it’s certainly an amazing feeling to be surrounded by so many other people who share the same love for the franchise, I don’t think the atmosphere at those competitive events comes anywhere near to capturing what it was like when Pokémon GO was breaking down those boundaries.
I think I’d also have to highlight the generosity of the Pokémon community. It’s a credit to our community that events like Pokéthon, Trainers Unite, and Catch A Million have been able to raise such an astounding amount of money for charity over the years, and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to be able to donate to and sponsor several of those events. In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to participate directly as a streamer in a few of these events along with the rest of our Bulba streaming team, and by the end I’m always left feeling overwhelmed by how much people have been willing to chip in to help those less fortunate, especially considering how tight people’s own budgets are at home right now.
In April 2011, you were interviewed by the popular gaming magazine Hyper for issue 211 (May 2011), where you discussed the history of the Pokémon franchise. What was that experience like for you?
Archaic:
I’ll be honest, I’d all but forgotten about that until you mentioned it. I’ve still got my copies of the issues, sent to me by the publisher, somewhere around, but they’re buried in a box somewhere and I wasn’t able to find them to reply to this. ^^;
I’m sad to say I haven’t been able to find any copies of whatever communications I had with the people at Hyper either. I do have email archives covering the period in question, and I certainly wouldn’t have deleted them intentionally, so I must have talked to them primarily via IMs, probably the old AOL Instant Messenger. I think the experience would’ve been somewhat similar to this interview experience, though, in that they would’ve sent me a list of questions in a Word document to answer and I would’ve responded with my answers the same way. It was similar when we did that roundtable interview for NF Magazine (Issue 24) in 2016 as well.
While it was certainly a good feeling to be recognised like that, I’m not sure it was really all that special to me. Partly because gaming magazines had already been on the decline for years in Australia at that point, and partly because I was more an NMS [Official Nintendo Magazine of Australia] reader than a Hyper reader as a kid. ^^;;
I would like you to predict some things for me! As of the time of interview in 2024, your community has been in operation for over twenty-five years! Where do you think Bulbagarden and the Pokémon franchise will be in another ten years?
Archaic:
Two words. Still around.
But seriously, a lot of my initial motivation for bringing Bulba back was the fact that our fandom has seen such repeated upheavals in the late 90s and early 2000s. So many of the sites that we’d known and loved had just died outright, or had been going up and down like yo-yos, either because of financial issues or neglect after their owners lost interest in the site and/or in Pokémon. And every time a site went away, with it went years of fandom history that were typically unrecoverable. After having seen one community after another die like that, I was determined that Bulba needed to be a place that could stand the test of time. So right from the beginning, when we resurrected Bulbagarden in 2002, a lot of my initial motivation was that I wanted to make sure we avoided falling into a situation where any single individual person could become a point of failure for the whole website. Indeed, I've prided myself for many years on the fact that we’ve largely managed to avoid that, though that’s been easier for some areas than others. Still, if the worst happened and something happened to me, I’m confident the site and community we’ve built would endure. That Bulba will always be here for the fans. I think that’s only become more important as the franchise and its fans continue to grow.
Unless Nintendo and/or The Pokémon Company seriously drop the ball somewhere, I certainly don’t see the Pokémon franchise fading away during the next 10 years. It may have some ups and downs in its popularity, sure, but I’d like to hope that even as it evolves and changes, it’ll still be the same Pokémon we’ve all grown to love at its core. But thinking about it... in 10 more years, the Pokémon Franchise itself will be 38 years old. We’re going to be at the point where people who got into the franchise as teenagers in the late 90’s may well be in the process of introducing the games to their grandchildren. That’s insane when you think about it. There’s not many characters that can manage to capture people’s imagination for that long. At this point, Pokémon is as embedded in our culture as Mickey Mouse or Superman. So for those sorts of fans, who might not have been around the fandom for years, who’ve grown up and had kids and grandkids who themselves are just starting to get into Pokémon, I’d like to think that they’ll always have somewhere familiar and safe that they could come back to in Bulba.
I think there will always be a need for a community like Bulbagarden in this fandom, even if the exact form of that community may change over time. Assuming that wikis are still the best way for collaborative documentation of information, Bulbapedia will still be here, but who knows how people will be interacting with the internet and data in ten years’ time. I would like to think and hope that use of AI won’t replace dedicated communities like Bulba. There’s a lot of hype and marketing around the various AI tools right now, but I feel they’re all still very unwieldy and awkward. They’re as likely to give you out-of-date or outright hallucinated information as they are to give you a useful answer. And really... I don’t think things like those AI tools are really conducive to a cohesive community. If I have a question, I’d rather ask a bunch of other fellow fans than ask an emotionless glorified chatbot. Human connections have been a core part of the franchise from the very beginning, right back to the idea of trading Pokémon and battling via link cable. Even as there’s been a shift towards more online interaction in-game, they’ve managed to preserve and encourage more collaborative and cooperative gameplay through things like Scarlet & Violet’s Union Circle. If I was a betting man, I’d say I think we’ll see Pokémon doubling down even more on that community element in the coming years, across all areas of the franchise.
Which Pokémon games do you consider to be your most liked and disliked, and why?
Archaic:
I might just be a bit contrarian and give spin-off answers for both. ^^;
Most liked - Pokémon Conquest. Outside of Pokémon, I’m a big fan of both turn-based strategy games like Fire Emblem and Musou/Warriors titles. Getting a Pokémon crossover with the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, with the historical characters using Samurai Warriors-inspired character designs, was just amazing. Really wish Conquest could get a sequel someday.
Most disliked - Pokémon Dash. While I normally love Pokémon spin-off titles, I always hated games on the DS which pushed me to use the stylus to move my character. The D-pad is right there; just let me use it.
You have been a fan of the franchise for quite some time, so I am curious to see some of the items from your Pokémon collection and special pieces that you have a personal connection with. What would you like to share?
Archaic:
A lot of the more valuable stuff is currently in storage, so I’m not able to take photos easily at this time, but some of the more notable things include:
The Game Boy Pocket used by Nob Ogasawara in translating the first two generations of the main series games
A cardboard cutout retail display of Ho-oh and Lugia from the release of Pokémon Gold & Silver here in Australia
The banner from the 2006 Australian Pokémon Trading Card Game National Championships, signed by myself and most of the Masters division top cut, plus several other competitors across all divisions
My 2006 Pokémon TCG Regional Championships trophy and 2007 City Championships medal
After more than twenty-one years under your leadership at the time of this interview, what have been your fondest memories of working on Bulbagarden so far?
Archaic:
I met my wife through the Pokémon franchise, and it was on Bulbagarden that we first really got to know each other. Can’t get much fonder than that.
On a less personal note... one memory that’s stuck with me was this time back in... I think it must’ve been in the early 2010s, when I received an email from a mother who credited Bulbapedia for helping to get her son interested in learning math. Apparently after they saw our catch rate page, they decided they wanted to better understand how it all worked.
Earlier in the interview, you mentioned shipping, where fans would pair their favourite characters together, such as Team Rocket's Jessie and James, which was a popular topic in the early days of Pokémon's fan community. What were your experiences of shipping?
Archaic:
Shipping was actually where I first made my name in the fandom, participating in the shipping community that grew up around the UPN forums. Shipping has a rich history in our Pokémon fandom, and calling it a “popular topic” in those early days might actually be doing a disservice to it, to be honest. If you look at the anime, video games, and TCG as being the big three pillars of the franchise, at the time you could make a solid argument that shipping was the fourth pillar, at least with respect to the activity and passion of the online fanbase.
While the term shipping wasn't coined by us (that was the X-Files fandom), the Pokémon fandom was undoubtedly responsible for popularizing the term in the late 90s and spreading it through wider fandom through Pokémon fans also being fans of other franchises such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, and Dragon Ball Z. Before those early days on the UPN forums, the various “shipping” terms for everything weren’t even in common use. People instead used terms like AAML (Ash and Misty’s Love) or SatoKasu (Satoshi/Kasumi). The first shipping list anyone put together was on UPN, a fairly modest thing by a poster called Parastoice. That was followed up by my (In)Complete List of Ships, which I remained the primary maintainer of until around 2004, and which is still around today in the form of Neverending Romance: The Incomplete Nightmare.
I know shipping often gets a bad rap, not all of it undeserved, but for those of us back in the day at least, we understood shipping as simply being about feeling like a group of characters have a certain relationship. Typically in a romantic sense, such as in a belief that a pair of characters are in a romantic relationship – or more accurately for the Pokémon fandom, where most of the characters are still quite young, a belief that a pair of characters hold (developing) feelings for each other and that they would develop a relationship at some point in the future. But you can also have ships over people being close platonic friends (friendships), or other forms of relationships. What’s probably important to emphasise, though, and what I think there’s been a lot of misconceptions about over the years by people outside shipping circles (and which is probably at least part of the reason for shipping’s bad rep), is that shipping is not inherently sexual. While there are certainly people who ship characters in a sexual relationship, that is neither the core of shipping nor the kind of shipping that the Pokémon shipping fandom was built on or based around.
Shippers come in many varieties. As a rough guide, you can think of shippers being on a continuum. Shippers at both ends of this continuum tend to be interested in "shipping hints", such as scenes from the anime which they feel indicate the characters having feelings for another, but their reasons for caring about these vary. At one end, some people are shippers just because they think a couple might be cute together — particularly with regards to the Pokémon fandom, you might think of these kinds of shippers as being similar to parents who think their own children's crush on some other family's kid is cute. They care about the "hints" because those are typically particularly cute character interaction scenes. Some people are shippers because they're interested in the ideas and themes that can be explored in a certain pairing, such as how certain dynamics would play out or how characters would interact with each other, either in canon or in an AU ("alternate universe") setting. Finally, at the other end, you've got some people who are shippers not because they hold any particular fondness for a couple, but because they are concerned with "canon" and investigating the intentions of the production staff. They're not just concerned with the "hints" in each piece of media, but also the meta-textual hints relating to the development of each piece of media and the franchise as a whole.
While we had examples of all kinds of shippers in the community, the forums at the time were very much dominated by those who cared about what was, or wasn’t, the intended canon. A lot of the discussions I was involved in were, if I honestly reflect on things, barely contained flame wars in the form of long debates about the nuances of the hints being claimed by each side. The Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender fandoms might think they know what a nasty shipping war looks like, but they never had anything on us back in the day. Heck, those old Pokémon shipping flame wars really only came to an end with an outright formal peace treaty between the “Official PokéShippers” (OPS), represented by myself, and “PalletShippers International” (PI), represented by ChaosRocket. As the two largest groups of shippers, and with the representatives of both sides having moderation powers in the shippers areas of the big sites at the time, we had the influence and authority to actually make things stick. After that, it took several generations going by, most of the old shipping community having moved on from Pokémon and/or shipping, and several new ships and their supporters emerging, before we really saw any widespread conflicts again, and those still paled in comparison to what we’d seen in the past.
Let's talk about your time with the Pokémon TCG a bit! You mentioned that you were involved in the competitive scene in Australia. Tell us more about your memories and experiences during your time competing.
Archaic:
So I was at my most active in the local TCG from around August 2005 (shortly before the rotation to the 2005-2006 format) to mid-2007. I was probably something of a big fish in the small pond that was our local scene at the time, pulling off wins in the 2006 Regionals in Brisbane, Australia (still have the glass Mewtwo trophy on display) and the 2007 City Championship, as well as getting to the top cut of 8 in Australian Nationals 2006. Didn’t do so well at 2007 Regionals though, largely because I hadn’t been able to even visit the league since Cities due to post-grad study. And then Australian Nationals 2007 was scheduled on the same Saturday as I had a pair of post-grad exams. After that, I was just too busy to go to leagues, and with the core of my deck having rotated, I wasn’t in a good position to try to go to any more tournaments. As it is, while I’ve been able to go to a few tournaments post-pandemic, I still don’t really have the time to do leagues again, and we’d have to travel a decent amount of time to get to the nearest one to us anyway.
In any case, I remember it all started for me when I picked up a heavily discounted EX Battle Stadium set from EB Games when they were clearing them out. I mean, sure, I’d played the game a decent amount back in school, mostly against family, but I’d never played more seriously. After getting that box and getting hooked into things again, I looked around online to try and find a league. While I didn’t see any at all in my state, I did see a store on the other side of town that seemed to be running regular weekly tournaments. I modified the deck as best as I could with the legal cards I had, turned up, and... well, I think the first tournament I turned up to only had about four people, all of us with things barely better than starter decks (I think one of them might have literally bought a starter deck on the spot even), which allowed me to manage a win.
That tiny tournament was the genesis of the first and only local league we had here in Brisbane for several years after that. I remember it actually was a real pain convincing the store owner that a proper league would be worthwhile. They ran several pre-release events after that tournament, and they hadn’t gotten all that many people attending, but our little group continued to turn up weekly and play, and it wasn’t like they didn’t have the spare play space anyway. The league eventually grew to a decent number. Not a lot, not even twenty, but enough that we crowded out the play space at the small store fairly quickly. We were a pretty motley bunch.
I can’t necessarily speak for the rest of the country, but the culture of our league ended up a bit peculiar compared to what I understood you’d typically see internationally. People tended to only have one deck, which they’d constantly tinker with to improve, and it was highly unusual for the Masters division players to switch decks except at rotation. In fact, it was practically taboo within the league to play the same deck as another player, at least within the same division. There was a strong sense that players should be coming up with their own strategies, rather than copying those of others. For that same reason, there was also a strong bias against what people called “netdecking”, simply copying decks others had posted online. A number of people were also strongly against posting information about their decks online, feeling like it would somehow give other players an advantage. I remember one incident where some people got extremely angry with me after I posted one set of tournament results on PokéGym, with brief information about the winners in each division (not even the decklists, but just a vague idea of their main Pokémon or combo), despite that this was already very common practise elsewhere.
Speaking of owning decks... the one I made [on] my own, and which I used for all my major tournaments during that period, was “Mercury”. That is, Gardevoir δ and Starmie δ. As an archetype, it never really took off in the US at the Master level, though I’m given to understand it had some success in Seniors and below. I remember a lot of people on PokéGym back in the day calling it “not a deck”. ^^;; I always wondered if the reasons it had issues in the States were just down to regional metagame differences (which would’ve been more pronounced back then, when it was harder for people outside the States to get all the cards they wanted, and when people were less inclined to travel to tournaments outside of their country of residence), or just from how I played it (with heavy disruption of my opponent’s board and hand through cards like Warp Point and Rocket’s Admin).
As for other memories and experiences I can share... I remember for a long period, up until they reprinted it in Holon Phantoms, the old Rare Candy card was more valuable than ex cards for our local competitive players. Most of the league started playing in 2006, long after 2005’s EX Emerald had gotten hard to find, and since a lot of people locally back then didn’t feel comfortable ordering from eBay, and hadn’t been collecting long enough that they might have had copies from the older EX Sandstorm printing, there were few ways for them to get their hands on the card. Actually, I have vague memories of one player in particular who I think might have even intentionally hoarded copies, to deny other players access for tournaments. It was a real limiting factor for a lot of players’ deck-building, especially below Masters division.
Archaic, thank you for taking the time to speak with us about Bulbagarden. The work you and your team have done throughout the years, especially with Bulbapedia, has been an immensely useful resource to so many fans, including myself. Do you have any closing comments you would like to make?
Archaic:
You’re most welcome. And thank you for being so patient with how long it took to get all my answers back to you. ^^;;
February 14th 2025 will mark the 20th anniversary of the public opening of Bulbapedia. We’re planning a bunch of special things for the birthday celebrations next, so we hope you’ll all be able to join us for that.
When we resurrected Bulbagarden, the average life expectancy of a major Pokémon fansite was maybe 3 years tops, and getting to the point we are today has been an amazing and priceless experience. This is a milestone that we simply could not have reached without you, the users. Regardless of if you’re someone who actively edits and contributes to Bulbapedia, or someone who just likes to read; if you visit daily or just occasionally; Bulbagarden and Bulbapedia simply wouldn’t be what they are today without the support you and everyone have given us over these decades. I look forward to making more milestones to come, together with you all.
I would like to extend a huge thank you to Archaic for taking the time to respond to all of our questions. It was great to hear the detailed history of the website, which has played such an important role to Pokémon fans for so many years. Happy 20th Anniversary to Bulbapedia! We wish Archaic, and the rest of the team, all the very best in the years ahead!
Community Spotlight: Bulbagarden
It makes sense this week to focus our Community Spotlight on the excellent Bulbagarden, and Bulbapedia, two great projects which are a pillar of the Pokémon fan community.
If you want to get the very latest Pokémon news, engage with other Pokémon fans in their forums, or chill with a fun stream on the Bulbagarden Twitch channel, you will not be disappointed with what this community offers. If you’re seeking information on a particular game or event, you'll find no better resource than Bulbapedia, with other 56,000 articles at the time of writing. If you see something that isn’t quite right, or know something that hasn’t been shared, you can even contribute to it yourself, and help to support the fan base with the knowledge you possess!
Visit: Bulbagarden, Bulbapedia
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This was such a great issue. A fascinating interview with the man himself. Thank you!
Whoa, "AAML" is a blast from the past. I was a kid back then so I had no idea the shipping wars were that heavy, but Archaic is absolutely right about it being a significant part of the fandom back then.
Also good to hear about the Bulbagarden app, I downloaded it right away.