But all the computers are connected via a network. Like I don't have to go all the way back to Pallet Town from Lavendar Town to retrive the Weedle I tossed in there.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I somehow never thought about that. How does that work? Do they use a giant network of pneumatic tubes?
Yeah. The Pokemon don't get digitised and stored in a buffer, their ID transferred to Bill's disks.
Bill just has an old PC case filled with occupied Pokeballs and a Chansey labelling them, ready to tube some back.
That's right. Pay no attention to the duplication glitch that occurs if you disconnect your Gameboys after trading one way.
It's definitely not restoring your totally unique and definitely not artificially reconstructed friend from a read only snapshot due to a glitch in Bill's transfer code.
Makes me wonder why Team Rocket never tried malware. They could control all capture Pokemon quite easily.
Wild Pikachus in your area down to get caught!
"Oooo!"
And suddenly they got access to all your stored Pokemon.
I think this was the plot of the banned Porygon episode.
See, this is how we end up collapsing the universe…
"The internet isn't some big truck you can dump everything onto! It's a series of pneumatic tubes!"
When we first meet bill, he's working on a teleporter that pretty clearly digitizes you, transports you down a wire, and then reconstructs you at the other end, so there's that.
They get turned into red light when going into pokeball. They get stored as red light. No need for tubes to store ball.
Since the masterball exists that must mean you keep the masterball on you always and just pull the pokemon out with any connected PC.
Correct, because the PCs in the Pokemon centers can communicate with Bill's PC where your mons are stored. Said communication likely happens over the internet, and since this is 1996 we're talking about, it's very possibly not encrypted.
The lack of encryption is exactly why Porygon Z exists. A bad transfer along with a dubious disk and sure enough, your Porygon 2 gets a virus. And that's not even 1996, but Gen IV.
The PC was accessible from every pokecenter.
It was a high availability cluster.
I mean, he could have had a decent RAID setup, back in the 90s, why not?
my admin breaks through the wall, fuming HOW OFTEN DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU, RAID IS NOT ACTUALLY A BACKUP!!!!!
RAID 1 and 2 existed by then, very feasible.
Actually I don't think Pokemon raids existed until Pokemon Go 😉
you can Pokemon Go the fuck outside 😄
Both the anime and the Manga establish that the PC is merely a teleporter to professor oaks lab were he can study the ones you aren't carrying. The games don't mention this, but it might be the same there too.
They could do so much with that concept too. Like imagine the little picnics you could do out in the wild zones in sword and shield, except that's just every time you go back and visit Oak's lab. It could give you way more incentive to come back to your home town
Cosmic ray: zap
CLOBBOPUS
has evolved into
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Now we know where missingno comes from.
Also, with no password so anyone can access anyone elses mons.
At least in the anime you had your Pokedex as a kind of key card but again, no password. Whats stopping Team Rocket from stealing someones Dex and stealing all their spare mons.
What's stopping Team Rocket just stealing someone's Dex and nabbing all their mons?
Incompetence.
I feel like there should have been an episode in the show that showcased Jessie trying to distract Nurse Joy while James stupidly withdraws an Onyx or some shit in the Pokemon Center resulting in them both getting smashed through a wall and deciding that stealing pokemon in non enclosed spaces was in their best interest
Bill's PC. As in Bill Gates, probably. You're lucky it didn't get overrun with malware.
(No idea who/what inspired the Japanese name マサキ though.)
I think the idea there is that Masaki is a fairly common, not very unique Japanese male name.
So, Bill is a fairly common, not very unique male name in English.
~~In French and Spanish, Bill is Sam, in German he's Lennart, in Italian, Alessio.~~
~~I think the idea was 'just some normal guy'.~~
EDIT:
Damnit.
I got got. Fucking LLM hallucinated those names.
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Bill
I'm going with bulbapedia as a more authoritative source than your local, friendly, delusional autocomplete machine.
The funny thing is this would involve backups which would involve the idea that you can just copy paste Pokemon which is a big no no in Gamefreak's world and even amongst Pokemon fans who go through insane hoops to transfer Pokemon from old games into new ones lol.
Me running PKHex: "Just a few 'legit' YOSHIRA Mew couldn't hurt."
Yes because no cloud service has ever utterly fallen over and taken half the internet with it /s
Maybe in that world Bill is running subscription based "computer as a service" business model?
Well I play crystal so
i hear he vibe codes his stuff now i wouldn't trust them with your pokemon
I gotta go check something… be right back.