A Nintendo DS development cartridge has turned up on eBay with an asking price of roughly US$9,100, and gaming preservationists are now arguing about whether it contains a Pokemon game that has been missing for twenty-one years.

The Listing

The auction is for a DS dev cart tied to a 2005 Japan-only release, reported variously as PokePark Fishing Rally and PokePark Fishing Tournament DS. Kotaku puts the asking price at about US$9,100, and GamesRadar notes that no publicly available copy of the game has ever been demonstrated, despite gameplay footage surfacing years ago.

The PokePark Kanto logo in yellow and green lettering
PokePark, the Pokemon theme park event that ran in Japan in 2005 and distributed the game. Logo via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

A Game Built to Delete Itself

It was never sold. It was handed out by download at Pokemon Centers and at PokePark, and players caught digital fish scored on weight, level and rarity, with results transmitted to leaderboards inside the stores. Then the DS powered down and the game erased itself. That was not a bug, it was how DS Download Play worked: nothing was meant to persist on the handheld.

That single design decision is why this is lost media rather than a rare cartridge. There was never a consumer copy to find. Anything that survives has to come from the distribution side.

A Nintendo DS Download Station kiosk with several tethered DS consoles displaying download menus
A DS Download Station kiosk. Games distributed this way lived in memory only and vanished on shutdown. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Why Preservationists Are Hedging

The scepticism is specific rather than reflexive. The listing describes the cartridge as a high-score ranking communication program, which sounds a lot more like the kiosk-side tool that collected and ranked scores than the fishing game people actually want.

Professor Rex, the preservationist who has been pushing the find, said as much directly: "There is a very good chance that the actually fishing rally may have been stored on a GBA cartridge." He has also floated splitting the cost, posting: "If you’d consider chipping in on a group-buy to preserve the software please DM me ~ I’m not sure if we would have any chance."

Our Take

Nine thousand dollars is a lot of money for a maybe, and the honest reading of the listing text is that this is probably the leaderboard tool. But it is also the closest anyone has got in two decades, and the alternative outcome is that it goes to a private collector and disappears for another twenty years.

Lost media stories mostly end in disappointment. This one at least has a physical object at the centre of it, which is more than most of them manage.