Welcome to Vol. 3, issue 53 of Johto Times! This marks the final issue of the year, with our usual recap of everything we did over the last twelve months. It has been a fun year, with the launch of our website and forum, and a plethora of content which we hope you have all enjoyed reading! From all of us here at Johto Times, we want to wish our readers a very happy new year and hope you all have a wonderful 2026!

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: End of Year Feature 2025

It's time to once again reflect on another year of Johto Times. Our final issue of 2025 looks back over the last twelve months of content, representing our third volume of Johto Times. We hope that the content we have shared this year has been interesting and enjoyable for all who have read it. I will also highlight some of the changes that will be coming with volume 4 of Johto Times in 2026.

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The continued growth of Johto Times

This year saw many new subscribers, and we end the year with 1,791 of you

Let’s start with a look at the Johto Times subscriber count as of December 2025. Looking back, we closed out 2024 with 810 subscriptions. While I have maintained that the numbers aren’t as important as the content, I found myself quite surprised earlier this year when our numbers exploded due to a poll that went viral (more on that later). At the time of writing, we have more than doubled that number, to 1,791!

This is a substantial jump, and while the increases in the months since that poll haven’t been as significant, I am very pleased to know that more people are reading Johto Times than ever before. Again, the numbers aren’t as important as the quality of the newsletter, and this will always be our focus. Thankfully, 2025 was a great year for Johto Times content, with lots of fantastic interviews, memories, and more!

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Recapping Volume 3 of Johto Times

We have another great year of features, – a huge thank you to everyone who contributed to Johto Times for Volume 3

This year, we published 53 issues of Johto Times as part of Volume 3, with 25 interviews, 14 memory features, and 14 other features. Nearly half of our newsletters featured industry insiders, former and current webmasters, and most importantly, fans of the Pokémon franchise who shared their stories with us. I am very thankful to all of them. In total, Johto Times has now published 155 issues, including this End of Year feature. I am incredibly proud of this achievement!

January was an especially great month for Johto Times. I want to point out two features in particular: an interview with Aspenth & Frogglet, who were the original creators of The Pokémon Factory, and the memories of a Pokémon fan called Tatton, who shared some incredible photographs and memories of a bygone destination for Pokémon fans. Aspenth had seen our previous interview with the current webmaster of The Pokémon Factory and wanted to share his memories with us. What was most shocking was how he still had a version of his website from 1999, which had otherwise been completely lost to time. Tatton was someone I had originally spoken to back in April 2023, but it wasn’t until early 2025 that I finally got the approval to share his memories and amazing photographs from the Pokémon Center New York store, some of the clearest images we have ever seen! It was truly such a pleasure to see something so historical.

In February, we shared an interview with Bulbagarden, an invaluable resource which has supported the Pokémon community since 1999. I had the pleasure of talking with its webmaster Archaic, who went into a lot of depth about the history of the website. I was grateful for his time, and to all of the staff I have been able to speak with since. The team at Bulbagarden have been hugely supportive of Johto Times since we began, and I am immensely thankful for their continued friendship.

For March, I had the opportunity to share one of my happiest and strongest Pokémon memories: attending Pokémon Symphonic Evolutions in London and how it combined my love of video game music with my passion for Pokémon. It was also great to share SteC's Pokémon Figure Collection – he may possibly be the biggest Aron fan I have ever known!

April saw us publish Peter's memories of Party of the Decade, a celebratory event to mark the 10th anniversary of Pokémon at Bryant Park in New York City. Peter shared his memories of qualifying for the event and attending the finals. He also shared great photographs from that day, capturing the moment for us to enjoy all these years later. We also published an interview with Dogasu’s Backpack, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Its webmaster, Dogasu, shared his thoughts and memories of working on the site for over a quarter century, as well as his role as the head of anime on Bulbagarden’s forum.

May was our most exciting month of 2025, as we hosted our Favourite Pokémon Poll for 2025 to determine the fans’ favourite Pokémon, voted on by Johto Times readers and the wider Pokémon community. The response to this was phenomenal, with a total of 582,516 votes cast over nine polls. A further 24,828 votes were cast in our Grand Final, which determined the winner to be Greninja! I’m thankful that we could provide something that gave so many people the opportunity to express their love for their favourite Pokémon and brought fans together on such a positive note. Looking back over the analytics of the poll has really shown me just how far-reaching it was. Our subscriber count more than doubled as a direct result of this poll, and my hope is that the people who did so continue to stay for the other work we have been doing.

June was when we shared our interview with James Colmer, the man responsible for building the Pokémon Island Adventure attraction at Warner Bros. Movie World, located on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. This short-lived experience became lost media until the photographs and stories that James shared gave us a look into this forgotten past.

We were proud to interview Bulbagarden back in February this year

In July, we published our interview with the long-running Pokémon forum PokéCommunity, a community which began in 2002. This was a special one for me because it's a community I have been a part of since almost the very beginning. It’s incredible to think it is still active all these years later. Another favourite of mine from July was our interview with Connor, who told us about his incredible trip to the real-world locations that inspired the Johto region. It was fascinating to hear about his adventures across Japan, and I hope that he manages to achieve his goals of visiting the real-world locations of Hoenn (Kyushu, Japan) and Unova (New York City, USA)

August was an especially significant month for us. We launched the Johto Times website and shared an interview with insight from our team about how it came together. Having our own home away from other platforms was a significant step for us, and I am thankful that Johto Times has been well-received and loved enough to justify this. We also had the pleasure of speaking with Ferretsroq, the top mod of r/Pokemon on Reddit. It was great to learn more about this massive Pokémon community hub, which is home to 4.7 million fans at the time of writing.

In September, I published a feature called Pocket Pikachu: The One Million Steps Challenge. It was an opportunity to share my experience with the classic device, first released in 1998, and how it improved my fitness, mental wellbeing, and overall motivation. Considering I never owned the original toy growing up, it was great to explore what the little device could do, all while having a positive impact on myself.

In October, I spoke with Jon Davies (SovanJedi), who created 3D models of Pokémon characters in the late 90s which were featured heavily across several different Pokémon fansites at the time, as well as around the wider community. They even appeared in magazines, such as Pojo's Unofficial Pokémon News & Price Guide Monthly. It was great to learn that Jon's work led him on the path of becoming a professional freelance pixel artist, an example to anyone who has a creative drive and a passion for what they do. We ended the month with some great memories from a fan called Jed, who shared photographs of his awesome Poliwhirl Halloween costume and pictures he drew back then. It was heartwarming to hear how supportive his mom was towards his interests, and it was a pleasure to share. October was also the month we opened the Johto Times Community Forum, which has 100 registered users at the time of writing!

We kicked off November with some great memories from Missingno. Master, who shared his passion for the legendary glitch from Red & Blue. I also had the opportunity to finally publish an interview with The Cleft of Dimensions, one of the earliest English Pokémon fansites, dating all the way back to June 1998! I’d spent a very long time trying to track down the creators of this website, so to finally speak with them and learn about their fansite was fantastic!

To end the month of November, we published an interview with Carol Rogalski, the former Communications and Marketing Director at Wizards of the Coast, who worked on the Pokémon Trading Card Game and many other products. Hearing Carol share her story of working at the company and learning more about the Pokémon TCG from someone who worked on it in the early days is always an exciting opportunity, and we are thankful to her for taking the time to do so.

It was a pleasure to interview Carol Rogalski in November, and hear her story of working at Wizards of the Coast on the Pokémon TCG

December is the time of year where the Johto Times team takes a well deserved rest, but we always have content scheduled in advance. It's also the time of year where I try to get something extra special out the door, and this year it is an interview with Gail Tilden, the former editor-in-chief of Nintendo Power Magazine, who was fundamental to the launch of the Pokémon brand outside of Asia. It’s an exciting interview, and one I am truly thankful for.

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Did we achieve what we set out to do in 2024?

Last year, I laid out my future plans for the newsletter and what I hoped to achieve in Volume 3. At the time, I mentioned that readers would likely see fewer interviews with fansites from the earliest days of Pokémon, due to having already reached so many of them and the difficulties in tracking down more. While this continues to be true, I am proud that we were able to add more to the list this year, and I hope we continue to do so in the years to come.

We did include a few websites which opened in the late 2000s and early 2010s, as well as more current websites. I feel it will be even more of a challenge to find the people behind these older websites as time goes on, but I continue to follow leads and hope to have opportunities to feature as many as we can.

I also met my goal of reaching out to more special guests and fellow Pokémon fans to share their memories, and I am extremely proud of everything we have published this year.

This year I committed to the release of the Johto Times website, and I am proud that we were able to finally achieve this. In addition to that, a community forum was launched, and it will hopefully serve as a home for many of our readers and fellow Pokémon fans. This is all thanks to our friend Renan, as well as the many close friends of Johto Times who gave their time to ensure everything was working properly and looked great.

While our side project to discover lost media and data related to Pokémon, Ruins of Alph Research, has made some progress, we are still not quite where we want to be. That being said, I think the ambition to discover more information about the early days of Pokémon is super important, and I will continue to do what I can to produce some results from our findings.

Finally, I shared my thoughts on the growing history of Johto Times and how we protect our content. Now that we have our website, and have corrected small errors in our previous work, it will now be easier to archive and make available elsewhere in the event that Johto Times were to come to an end. This important work must always be available for those who are interested, in the years and decades to come.

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Future Plans

Johto Times logo

My plans for Johto Times in 2026 may produce some mixed feelings. Back in November, I explained that Johto Times would change its release schedule from one issue per week to at least one issue per month. This is to ensure that we have time to produce, edit, and review content in a timeframe that is right for the whole team. In our very first issue, I stated that I would listen and learn to adapt the newsletter and ensure things go smoothly. To continue doing this after more than 150 issues, I need to consider the wellbeing of everyone who works on this, myself included. While I hope this remains a temporary change, I must prioritise what is most important. That said, we plan to evaluate the return to a weekly newsletter in the near future. I know that many of our readers will understand this, and my commitment to providing quality content has not changed.

Starting with Volume 4, we will release a newsletter on the last Thursday of each month. If we have the time and opportunity, we will publish more! Each one will arrive in your inboxes as usual, and we recommend bookmarking our website too, just to ensure you never miss out!

I also plan to add more features to the Johto Times website, including a database detailing information about the different Pokémon fansites out there and a links page which will feature a curated list of active sites and communities. The goal of these two features is to support the wider Pokémon community and give other fansites some much deserved visibility.

This brings to a close our final issue of Volume 3. Johto Times will return on January 29th, 2026. As always, a huge thank you to my team, which includes Dragonfree, Roy, Jim, Ashtear, Frost, Mlu, Lady Vulpix, Slix, and Renan. A shout-out to Teo as well, for his support with the news this year. I also thank all of our guests and readers for their support throughout 2025.

I look forward to working on the newsletter throughout 2026, the year of Pokémon’s 30th anniversary!