An ex-Pokémon lawyer has shared a triumphant story in which he tracked down and course-corrected a young leaker by calling his mom and telling her what he was up to. Don McGowan used to be the general counsel at Destiny studio and Sony subsidiary Bungie , but before that he was The Pokémon Company's chief legal officer for more than 10 years. McGowan gave an insightful interview to Bloomberg in which he shared some of his experiences chasing down leakers for major video game companies.
My favorite story he shared was about a child leaker named Andrew, who seemingly innocently strayed from the light under the internet's shadow before a conversation between McGowan and his mom struck the fear of Nintendo's legal team into his heart. "Back when I was at Pokémon, some kid figured out how to extract the images from the card game," McGowan recalled. "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 .
