Welcome to Vol. 3, issue 52 of Johto Times! This issue should have landed inside your inbox a day early on December 24th, and so I wish you and your loved ones a merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a joyous time however you plan to spend it! In this issue, we are sharing an interview with Altissimo, from Altissimo's Pokémon Site, a great resource of Pokémon information. Compared to a lot of our content here at Johto Times, Altissimo's website is fairly new, having launched back in 2022.

Now that we are in December, the Johto Times team are taking a well deserved rest. For this reason, we will not be updating our news, and our mailbag will not be monitored during this time. A recap of the noteworthy headlines will be available in our January newsletter! Any important news announcements will be made on our Bluesky account and on our Discord server. You are welcome to join us on the Johto Times forum too!

Feature: Interview with Altissimo's Pokémon Site

Altissimo’s Pokémon Site offers a huge amount of information focused on the main series and spin-off games, which attempts to fill gaps in what content has been covered elsewhere. We had the pleasure of speaking with Altissimo, the creator of the website, to discuss the work she has been doing to provide this fantastic resource for Pokémon fans!

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Altissimo’s Pokémon Site logo

Thank you so much for agreeing to an interview, Altissimo! Let’s begin with an introduction. Tell us about yourself and your website!

Altissimo:

I'm Altissimo; I'm a Pokémon fan in her 30s who has been a fan of the series since 2003, when I was introduced to it by a friend. I've played all the main series games up to Sun and Moon, both Legends games, and have done a bunch of completionist stuff – sometimes multiple times – in a variety of side games, including the Mystery Dungeon series, the Ranger series, the two Snap games, Trozei, Colosseum, XD, and the Picross games. Although I stopped being as invested in the games around the time Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon came out, the Legends games and New Snap brought me back, and I'm looking forward to playing gens 7-9 properly as I do research for this project.

My website contains a lot of information about a lot of main series and spin-off games. One of my biggest interests in this regard is Pokédex completion, as I've found it really difficult to find documentation about how to complete the Pokédex in some games or where to find Pokémon. Generally speaking, though, it is intended to be two things:

1. An open-source project where people can publish tools and resources that they want to exist somewhere with reasonable visibility. (So far, though, the only pull requests I've gotten have been for a couple Mystery Dungeon tools.)

2. A reliable source for general information that I don't really see documented in very many places on the Internet, or at least not formatted in the way I personally would want to see it. A lot of what I do is admittedly self-indulgent, but I took the phrase "if you want something done right, do it yourself" to heart!

The history of the website dates back to February 2022, but the website really took shape in October 2024, when you really started to commit to it. What encouraged you to create a website in the first place?

Altissimo:

The site was originally created to host a couple of tools I was working on for the speedrunning communities for Legends: Arceus and Mystery Dungeon. I followed Legends: Arceus speedrunning from the beginning since I fell in love with that game instantly, and one of the biggest runners (halqery) is someone I was already friends with. I noticed that a lot of the tools they were using seemed inadequate for something you want to quickly consult while playing fast, so with feedback from what they wanted I created some maps they could use. For a while, the site was just a hosting place for the few tools I made for the community.

At some point I realized I was growing frustrated with the paucity of documentation in one place for some other things I was interested in, and I realized that I was one of the few people who was capable of making documentation for some of the things I care about (my friends/collaborators and I are the first people in the English-speaking community that we know of to dump some tables from the WiiWare Mystery Dungeon games and Trozei, for instance), and that "what I care about" was really a lot bigger than I thought it was, so at some point I decided I was going to try to put documentation for encounter tables for most Pokémon games where I could find those tables in one place. The scope has expanded some since that, but that's the origin story.

Your website covers video game mechanics of various Pokémon titles, including spin-offs. How do you decide upon the types of content you wish to cover?

Altissimo:

A close friend of mine has endeavored to complete the Pokédex on every game that has one (or every game that has something resembling one). Seeing his struggles with some games having inadequate documentation is what made me care about Pokédex completionism in the first place, so my set of goals roughly aligns with the games he wants to complete. I have some differences from what he wants to do (I don't want to cover mobile games because of how often they can change, for instance, and I don't think anyone particularly needs documentation for Pokémon Typing Adventure) but at the very least I want to cover main series, the games compatible with main series, and spin-offs with a significant completionist element that don't offer adequate documentation by themselves. (Picross, for example, provides all its own details on what you need to do to beat it.)

The main goal is Pokédex completion, but sometimes during my research, I'll run across research done by other people that doesn't seem to have a public 'home'. (One example is my Pinball R/S page on scoring mechanics, which was originally just a Google Doc made by a user of a small Discord server. Realizing that this is the kind of thing people might want to come across in their searches, I asked permission to copy it to a page on my site, which was granted.) When that happens, I usually try to link the original source or otherwise credit the creator/documentor, because I always want to make it clear I'm not trying to steal anyone's research – just trying to give it a home.

The fact that I'm a programmer, though, means that there's a lot of data I can pull myself from the pret [Pokémon Reverse Engineering Team] decompilation or other open-source tools drawing directly from the game data, so not everything is sourced directly from someone else.

A screenshot from Altissimo’s Pokémon Site (December 2025)

Your commitment to your website is extremely impressive! At the time of writing, you have maintained near daily updates for over a year, and you’ve managed to bring so much content to the website in such a short period of time. What keeps you motivated?

Altissimo:

Legitimately I find it fun. There's something relaxing about just turning on a YouTube video and writing documentation or coding programs to extract data or what have you when it's about Pokémon! Maybe there will be a time in the future when it's not so fun but I'm not there yet.

I'm also blessed to have a reasonable amount of downtime where I can do work on the site without having to feel like it's taking away from time I could spend doing something else, which is how I'm usually able to make updates every day.

Also, ever since I was a teenager, I've often found myself working on some sort of "computer project" for something or other. Before I got into programming, sometimes these would just be haphazard documents or guides relating to something I was interested in, or writing stories. Finding motivation for one of my ongoing "projects" has never been difficult for me, but heck if I can tell you why or how to replicate it!

Which offsite resources have been useful to you during your research?

Altissimo:

Bulbapedia is always the starting point for anything I do relating to main series games, although I take care to double-check everything I look at from there – whether by playing through the game to check if something is really accurate to how it's described, dumping the data myself to compare, or consulting with another dump or decomp project (such as pret). I also have a handful of programmer friends that have been able to answer questions for me about various code issues I run into. Finding Discord servers for specific games or communities (speedrunners/high score communities, modding/hacking servers) is also a great way to come across resources that a simple Google search won't really reveal to you as easily.

I always like to reference The Cave of Dragonflies where I can, too, because that site was part of my formative Pokémon years. I've been deeply inspired by the pages Dragonfree has put out over the years and her own dedication to the site, so if I can find documentation about something on her site first I'd prefer to link to it!

Which Pokémon titles have been particularly challenging for you to document?

Altissimo:

Trozei is obscure enough that I'm still not sure to this day quite how the mechanics about legendary Pokémon work, or what the spawn rates are for regular and rare Pokémon. Mystery Dungeon I haven't gotten to yet, but it will be nasty when I do, because it's got a whole host of spawn tables I have to figure out how to document and people routinely ask questions about it that make me realize I probably need to make a full "Pokédex" for those games, and I need to do a lot of data dumping myself to make that happen. Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee still have some mechanics that are obscure to me, and which I'm not likely to figure out how to dump soon due to my unfamiliarity with Switch architecture. I also want to put up strategies for the Master Trainers but that requires me to figure out how to beat them all first, haha!

Compared to some of the fansites we cover, Altissimo’s Pokémon Site is quite new, so I am curious to hear what your future plans are for the website!

Altissimo:

The plan is to get encounter tables and any other completionist documentation, as closely sourced from the game data as I can, up for all main series games, the Legends games, the Ranger games, Mystery Dungeon, the Snap games, Conquest, and possibly the Rumble series and Battle Trozei (which I haven't played before). Once I'm 'caught up' I want to continue documenting games as they come out.

That being said, ideally I'd actually like to [have] at least one co-collaborator to help take over documentation of future games, or at least help with it, once I get 'caught up'. It's an open-source project for a reason, and ultimately I want for this to kind of pass into being a community resource more than something that's run by me exclusively. Partially, selfishly, because I would want to add more free time to my life at that point, but also because it's a given I won't be around forever, but I'd want for the legacy of accurate documentation and the work I've already done to carry through [to] the future!

Like many Pokémon fans, we all have stories of how we first got into the series, and the cherished memories we have growing up with it. What can you tell us about your earliest memories of Pokémon?

Altissimo:

I was introduced to the franchise by a friend (we are still friends today!) in 2003. I got Pinball R/S for Christmas that year – starting my love for spinoff games – and purchased Ruby and Sapphire with Christmas money. I was pretty hooked from there – starting with Diamond/Pearl I got every main series game on release day until Sun and Moon, and I also got very, very into Mystery Dungeon and Ranger when those series came out. Mystery Dungeon in particular holds a special place in my heart for being one of the first "good stories" that Pokémon actually has, and I'll admit to crying at the end of every game (even Gates to Infinity which I didn't play until I was 24). The first Mystery Dungeon game was also a particular bonding game for me and the same friend that got me into Pokémon – we were so very obsessed with that game, with the story, the music, the concept as a whole – and we drew a lot of pictures and comics about our teams and we still make jokes about my old team to this day.

A fun story – I had enough trouble beating Ruby with just a Blaziken (I skipped most trainers and only trained my starter) that when that same friend beat the game before me and caught Rayquaza, she nicknamed it 'Greenfly' (because it is green... and flies) and traded it to me to beat the game with. Normally I don't get sentimental about old team members or anything, but I transferred Greenfly and the Latios I caught in that copy of Ruby up to gen 6 at least before I lost them somewhere. Long live the memory of Greenfly who allowed me to cheese the Elite Four!

It's always great to see the special Pokémon items or merchandise that mean something to our guests. Do you have anything special that you would like to share with us?

Altissimo:

I don't have a lot; I've never really been a merch person and most of what I do have isn't really sentimental.

That said, I do have a handful of Pokémon cards that I chose to keep from my childhood, either because I liked their art/the Pokémon depicted or I did have a story behind them. I have a copy of this Vaporeon that was a trade with the same friend who got me into Pokémon. I wanted the card, but she told me she'd only trade it to me for a Mew (her favorite Pokémon). I pulled this one out of a booster pack and true to her word, she traded me for it!

A selection of cards from Altissimo’s collection, including a Vaporeon card from EX Unseen Forces

Altissimo, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions! Do you have any closing comments you would like to make to our readers and fans of your website?

Altissimo:

For everyone who's still reading the Johto Times or looking at my site in 2025, when it can be so difficult to find places like these through Google searches, and when sometimes people are preferring video content to written content – thanks for continuing to support this 'older style' of Internet content; it's great to see people still out there looking for and reading sites like ours in spite of it all. I appreciate every email I receive about my website, and remember – it's an open source project, so if you have any HTML experience, feel free to contribute your own content, or reach out to me about creating something new! :)

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A massive thank you to Altissimo for taking the time to tell us all about her fascinating project! We are super impressed with all the work she is doing and wish her the very best of luck moving forward!

Interview conducted on: November 18th, 2025
Interview published on: December 24th, 2025