Right now, on eBay, there’s a Nintendo DS development cartridge carrying $9,145.66 in bids. On a DS game. And no one can say with confidence that it holds what everybody is hoping for.
Welcome to Pokémon preservation in 2025: a bidding war over a slab of plastic that may contain a fishing minigame from 2005 — or may contain nothing of any use.
You’d think Pokémon is simply too enormous to misplace anything. Billions of dollars annually, aisles of merchandise, a release schedule with no off switch. Surely an operation on that scale documents everything it produces.
It doesn’t. Media vanishes. Games, movies, TV series, pilots, books — any of it can drift away until the work might as well never have existed.
The game almost nobody got to play
We’re talking about PokéPark Fishing Rally DS, a DS Download Play exclusive. If the name means absolutely nothing to you, that’s the normal reaction.
It arrived in 2005, exclusively in Japan. It ran first at the PokéPark theme park for a handful of months, then later at a few Pokémon Centers and at Pokémon Festa, the annual convention that no longer exists.
Which means that unless you were a Pokémon fan who lived in Japan or visited that year, it never passed through your hands. No other route existed.
Twelve hours, then it’s gone
Let’s not inflate what this actually was. It was a fishing minigame, deliberately simple, in which you reeled in various Pokémon and hunted for the biggest and rarest specimens.
The delivery method was the twist. Since it was distributed via DS Download Play at those venues, the game disappeared as soon as your DS was switched off — or once you’d played for 12 hours.
Impermanent by design. A way to occupy fans at an event and spark a bit of friendly rivalry, and then nothing.
Twenty years in the ether
After it was pulled, the trail went cold. ROMs might exist somewhere, but none have ever made it into online preservation, and private collectors are sitting on them.
So that’s over 20 years of a Pokémon spin-off gathering dust in someone’s drawer. And it was fused to a genuine chunk of franchise history — a real physical park with a real line of children clutching real DS units.
Then a copy turned up on eBay.
What’s actually in the box
The listing, posted by a private seller, is for a Nintendo DS Development/Test Cartridge said by some to contain a copy of PokéPark Fishing Rally DS. Game preservationists spotted it quickly, and their motive is singular: dump it, distribute it, and finally give the public access to media that’s been locked away since 2005.
Which brings us to the first snag. The cartridge could be a “sub-card” — the component used to beam the game wirelessly to other consoles over DS Download Play, or to store and track player scores so staff at the event could award prizes.
Should that turn out to be the case, it’s a fascinating relic and little else. Zero practical value for preserving the game itself.
The money problem
And then there’s the price tag. As of writing, the listing stands at $9,145.66 — an absurd sum for a DS game, and far beyond what anyone acting purely out of good will can manage.
Preservationists, among them Professor Rex on X, are pooling funds in an attempt to outbid private buyers who would rather stockpile the cartridge than dump it. The odds aren’t good.
That’s the grim arithmetic of preservation. Those hoping to give something away for nothing are up against those who want sole ownership, and the latter group usually has more money.
Why this one stings
No one is claiming Fishing Rally is a forgotten classic. It’s a minigame. You fish, you measure, you leave.
But in a way, that’s the whole issue. Throwaway material is precisely what goes missing first, because it never occurs to anyone to archive something that was never built to survive.
For preservation, a game with a 12-hour self-destruct baked in is the nightmare scenario. It was built to leave nothing behind, and it succeeded.
Whether this fragment of Pokémon lost media reaches the public and becomes playable on a DS remains an open question. For the moment the bids keep rising, the seller remains anonymous, and a fishing game from a Japanese theme park sits in a listing valued above most people’s cars.
Somewhere in Japan, a child who stood in line at PokéPark back in 2005 landed a huge Magikarp, powered down their DS, and watched the entire thing vanish without realizing it.
