Former Pokémon lawyer reveals wildest leaker he dealt with

Back when I was at Pokémon, some kid figured out how to extract the images from the card game. He found an icon from the developer and said ‘Holy s—-, I found a new Pokémon.’ This kid included his email, and because of the way Pokémon did account creation, when we got the child’s account, we got the parent information, which included a phone number.

So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’

The kid was live-tweeting it. The tweets were this:

1. Pokémon just called my house.
2. What the hell is a general counsel?
3. I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.

Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years.