The story of PVB

PoKéMoN Virtual Battle was born in early 2007, under the fingers of a self-taught French developer called Folken. He had learned to code on the Site du Zéro: mIRC scripts first, then (X)HTML, then PHP and MySQL written by hand. The site opened on 7 June 2007.

Four months later it had more than a thousand active accounts and nearly a hundred and fifty thousand battles between members. By 2013 the counters read 8,137 sign-ups, 39,223 PoKéMoN caught and over a million Gym battles.

The game lived at three addresses: pub-line.com, then folken.fr/pvb from August 2008, and finally pokemon-virtual-battle.com. The last known forum thread is dated 11 October 2019: a player was asking whether the game was dead. Both domains have since expired.

What this reconstruction owes to the archives

The OG theme is not an interpretation: it comes from the original site's CSS/jaune.css stylesheet, found in the Wayback Machine (capture of 22 January 2016). The yellow of the frames (#FFFFCC), the orange of the links (#FF9933), the border (#FFCC66), the banner, the Poké Ball bullet on the headings: everything is taken to the pixel. The home page, rules and statistics texts come from the same captures.

The game screens (map, battle, PC), on the other hand, were never archived: the Internet Archive's crawler did not log into accounts. Those screens are therefore an honest reconstruction, not a copy; they rest on what the archives do show (the menu categories, the Trainer sheet labels, the statistics sections) and on the official generation 4 mechanics.

Credit

After PoKéMoN Virtual Battle, created by Folken (2007). This reconstruction is neither official nor affiliated, and is not for profit. PoKéMoN is a trademark of Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak.

Folken, if you ever read this: thank you. And if you kept the code or the database, there is a place for them here.