A Nintendo DS development cartridge is sitting on eBay right now with $9,145.66 in bids on it. For a DS game. And nobody’s even certain it contains what everyone hopes it contains.
That’s the state of Pokémon preservation in 2025: a bidding war over a piece of plastic that might hold a fishing minigame from 2005, or might hold nothing useful at all.
Pokémon feels too big to lose things. Billions of dollars a year, shelves of merchandise, a release calendar that never stops. You’d assume a machine that size keeps receipts on everything it makes.
It doesn’t. Media disappears. Games, films, TV shows, pilots, books, all of it can slip away until the work reads like it was never made.
The game almost nobody got to play
The title in question is PokéPark Fishing Rally DS, a DS Download Play exclusive. If that name draws a total blank, that’s expected.
It launched in 2005, Japan only. First at the PokéPark theme park for a few months, later at select Pokémon Centers and at the now defunct Pokémon Festa annual convention.
So unless you were a Pokémon fan living in or visiting Japan that year, you never touched it. There was no other way in.
Twelve hours, then it’s gone
I won’t oversell what this thing was. It’s a fishing minigame, simple by design, where you caught different Pokémon and chased the biggest and rarest ones.
The catch was the delivery. Because it ran through DS Download Play at those locations, the game vanished the moment your DS powered down, or after 12 hours of playtime.
Temporary by construction. Something to keep fans entertained at an event and stir up a little friendly competition, then evaporate.
Twenty years in the ether
Once it was discontinued, it went dark. ROMs may exist somewhere out there, but they’ve never been preserved online and are being kept hidden by private collectors.
That’s more than 20 years of a Pokémon spin-off sitting in a drawer somewhere. And this one was welded to a real piece of the franchise’s history, an actual physical park with an actual queue of kids holding actual DS units.
Then a copy surfaced on eBay.
What’s actually in the box
A private seller listed a Nintendo DS Development/Test Cartridge containing what some believe to be a copy of PokéPark Fishing Rally DS. Game preservationists noticed fast, and they want it for one reason: to dump it, share it, and hand the public access to media that’s been out of reach since 2005.
Here’s the first problem. That cartridge might be a “sub-card,” the thing used to wirelessly push the game to other consoles through DS Download Play, or to hold and track player scores so event staff could hand out prizes.
If that’s what it is, it’s a fascinating artifact and nothing more. No practical use in preserving the game itself.
The money problem
Then there’s the number. At the time of writing the listing sits at $9,145.66, an astronomical figure for a DS game and well past the reach of anyone doing this out of goodwill.
Preservationists including Professor Rex on X are pooling money to outbid private buyers who’d sooner hoard the cartridge than dump it. It’s unlikely to pay off.
That’s the ugly math of preservation. The people who want to give something away for free are bidding against people who want to own it alone, and the second group tends to have deeper pockets.
Why this one stings
Nobody’s arguing Fishing Rally is some overlooked masterpiece. It’s a minigame. You fish, you compare sizes, you go home.
But that’s sort of the point. The disposable stuff is exactly what disappears first, because nobody thinks to save the thing that was never meant to last.
A game with a built-in 12-hour self-destruct is preservation’s worst-case scenario. It was engineered to leave no trace, and it did its job well.
Whether this piece of Pokémon lost media ends up in public hands and playable on a DS is still open. For now the bids climb, the seller stays anonymous, and a fishing game from a Japanese theme park sits in a listing worth more than most people’s cars.
Somewhere in Japan, a kid who queued up at PokéPark in 2005 caught a big Magikarp, turned off their DS, and unknowingly watched the whole thing disappear.
