With thanks to Diggeroney for thinking to archive stuff in 2004, Duo for still actually having that archive in a place they could access it, Hiber for both for hosting these archives, and for doing a lot of digital archaeology with the Wayback Machine, and the 10th Anniversary PokéBattles team for the bits and bobs that are archived there for making any of this vault possible.
This is not the first incarnation of Sandy Version to exist. This page mostly exists to document the history of Sandy Version, as best as it can be gathered. None of this is required reading for this incarnation of Sandy Version, and is presented here simply as a historical record. It was 20 years ago, there are likely a lot of things about it I wouldn't have done that way today, but also there are some aspects that when I look back on I actually think are quite nice. Or had the hint of being nice if I had done a bit more planning or been a bit better of a writer.
Other incarnations of Sandy might exist, somewhere, either in the Internet Archive or in the ethers of the web, with little to no recollection of their existance from myself - I forgot about Sandy Version: Advanced's existence until being linked to Foxfire Version and doing a bit of an archive binge of various things, but if another exists, I am currently unaware of it. I think there was at least one other incarnation of Sandy Version that made it to the internet but which I cannot find any trace of. If they show up, this list will be updated.
Sandy Version - Active between 2001 and 2004. Consists of 65 battles, 2 tournaments, and 2 fics, mostly uploaded between January 2001 and July 2002, with 5 battles being uploaded after this point. Layout is extremely borked for reasons that aren't entirely due to the Wayback Machine or changes in screen sizes, but the site design, ignoring the front page which was a temporary non-design while it was between designs, was targeting 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions from my recollection, so to an extent it was always going to wind up looking weird on modern screens.
Sandy Version: Advanced - In 2006 there was an attempt to revive PokéBattles generally in a forum format, which I was part of. Briefly. Two battles exist, both dating to December 2006, although given that the last known PokéBattles Advanced battle dates to January 2007, this... Is unsurprising.
Sandy 2018 - In 2018, in an attempt to drag myself out of a creative rut, I started going to a park once a week and writing something. And those things all wound up being PokéBattles. These battles were never published anywhere, but I recently found the notepad I wrote them in, and have typed those up and to the best of my ability tried to recreate what I was going for with them here. 4 Battles were written in this attempt, which is why I didn't do anything with them.
What's interesting looking at them is how much of an opposite approach I was taking with these compared to the current Sandy Version. Firstly, it draws attention to changes that in the actual revival I just changed subtly, but even more on the world-building - This is a world where the Narrator has been absent for as long as Sandy hasn't been being updated, the actual revival has had the Narrator omnipresent. This version's Narrator is explicitly not omnipresent, the actual revival's Narrator is omnipresent.
I think my plan - had I continued with them - was to have kept alternating between Beth and Dave, Beth having new PokéBattles related adventures, Dave hunting SVWebmaster down to try and kill him.
In addition to Sandy Version, I collaborated with a number of other authors on various other versions, along with sending some fan battles around. This is an attempt to record everything I wrote that was PokéBattles related outside of Sandy. Depending on my role in the collaboration, I had a greater or lesser degree of control over what the content of the battles were. If anyone who worked with me on any of these get in touch with me about their thoughts on these projects, I will add them alongside mine.
Ghost Version - My first collaborative version. This was with MetalMike of Blood Version. From my recollection, we wrote the battles for Ghost entirely independently of each other, alternating weeks for the most part. It appears to have been active between October 2001 and February 2002, and contains 8 battles and one part of the War's Beginning fanfic that spread across multiple of MetalMike's versions. Battle 1 doesn't seem to have survived.
Nazgul Version - An attempt to do a PokéBattles style parody of Lord of the Rings, cowritten by myself and Treesock. It was mostly active in the first half of 2002, with a 9th battle going up in 2004. It only lasted 9 battles. I have zero clue why we were doing this, but the writing process for it was really enjoyable - We'd sit down in an IRC private message, and we just kind of wrote it in IRC, chipping in whatever and making "Wait, that works better if we add it before there" comments before I'd go off and convert the log (cutting out anything that was comments to each other and not comments that were intended to go into the thing) into HTML. The way we approached the project was, in retrospect, doomed from the offset, and I suspect that was my fault rather than Treesock's.
Leprechaun Version - I have zero recollection of how I wound up involved in this nonsense, but I wrote a battle for it. I think it was a collaboration in the same vein as Ghost, and - like Ghost - was with MetalMike, along with Psychic Jack. Active between July and August 2002, I only wrote Battle 4. I might have been the token third webmaster since I think Psychic Jack and MetalMike already had a collaborative version.
Wave Version - A series of PokéBattles audio dramas. I think this was my idea, having discovered Big Finish's Doctor Who audio dramas around Christmas 2003. I then realized PokéBattles, which has a format that relied on the audience not being able to for some of the comedy, were essentially scripts already and that the format would work in a pure audio format due to the scripts assuming zero visual elements. I then somehow convinced MrKite15 of Liquid Version and Diggeroney of Plaid version into helping me make them, in particular Diggeroney since he was editing the damn things. Then the three of us somehow convinced various members of the PokéBattles community at the time into doing voice acting for us.
These were recorded by a bunch of teenagers dotted around the world in our bedrooms on very bad microphones, so do not go in expecting anything resembling the audio quality of a modern day podcast, and was probably the most collaborative version of PokéBattles to date. While the three of us were writing and editing it, we really couldn't have done it without the various folk in the PokéBattles community on IRC and the Yellow Version forums of the time.
We had a process more resembling an actual collaborative writing/editing setup than any other version I collaborated on - We all wrote scripts, sent the scripts back and forth between us, while editing each other's scripts. And then we sent any voice recordings we needed to make to Diggeroney, who worked magic with editing. It was active in 2004 and lasted for 6 battles. Sadly, the battles are undated but seem to have been posted between around April through to June 2004 Only one battle survives - the almost five minute original battle, and only in the Monkey Audio file format (VLC player supports it by default these days), although judging by the file size of the mp3 files, the length ballooned after this battle. The whole thing Lasted 6 battles, shifting to a fortnightly schedule for the last 3 once we'd maxed out our Network update stars.
Liquid Version - I co-wrote 5 battles of Liquid Version in 2004 between April 20th and May 31st, specifically the Cannabis Version arc. The process was very similar to the process for writing Nazgul but far more chaotic, and it was Kite doing the conversion to HTML rather than myself. I recall him mentioning at some point that part of the process of writing this nonsense was figuring out setups to non sequitur punchlines I'd toss into the mix.
I don't think I ever found out how much of the plot (as opposed to the gags and specific bits of writing) he'd already planned, and how much was his attempts to deal with my nonsense. I believe this was after Wave started, but the undated nature of Wave's battles and these happening close enough to the same time that at one point I was in a three way tie on the Network rankings with myself between these specific Liquid Version battles, Wave Version, and Sandy Version, that it is very difficult for me to be certain of that.
Pearl Version - I wrote the first Battle for Pearl Version, the PokéBattles 10th Anniversary Edition's fan battle page, which was published April 6th 2009.