A former Pokémon lawyer shared a remarkable story of how he tracked down a young leaker and got him back on track by calling his mother and telling her what he’d been up to.
Don McGowan was Destiny Studios’ legal counsel. Sony subsidiary BungeeBut before that, he served as the Pokémon Company’s chief legal officer for more than 10 years. Bloomberg He shared some of his experiences tracking leakers for a major video game company.
My favorite story he told was about a young leaker named Andrew who seemed innocently shying away from the light in the shadows of the internet, but a conversation with McGowan and his mother had instilled in him a fear of Nintendo’s legal team.
“When I was at Pokémon, one kid figured out how to extract images from the card game,” McGowan recalls. “He saw the developer icon and said, ‘Wow, I’ve found a new Pokémon.’ This kid had registered with an email address, but because of the way Pokémon accounts are created, when we got the child’s account, we also got the parent’s information, including their phone number.
“So I called his mom and I said, ‘Hey, I want to show you some of the things Andrew does on computers,’ and she said, ‘So what he does is hack your games,’ and I heard a voice in the background say, ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I started to get more technical, and she said, ‘Is this a problem?’ I said, ‘Hacking software is a federal crime, and I don’t want to talk about that. How about we talk about some of the good and bad things he can do on computers?'”
Andrew, meanwhile, live-tweeted the situation, saying: “‘Pokemon called me at home’ ‘What’s a corporate lawyer?’ ‘I know what I did was wrong and I’ll never do it again’. It was awesome. 5 years in Pokemon has really cemented my legend.”
Perhaps an older, wiser Andrew would have known how closely the Pokémon Company guards its intellectual property, but in retrospect I hope he considers this a blessing in disguise. After all, if he’d been a few years older and with a less tolerant lawyer, he could have gotten himself into very serious trouble. Instead, he learned a valuable lesson, and we get this hilarious story at his expense.
Now, let’s rank them Best Pokemon games?
