A long-lost Pokémon game has re-emerged on eBay, kicking off a bitter bidding war between private collectors and video game preservationists, who fear that the game may truly be lost forever if its source code isn’t archived.
PokéPark Fishing Contest DS, was never formally released on its titular home console. You could only download the game at Pokémon-themed events through the DS’s Download Play feature, and the downloaded copy would automatically delete itself from the memory card once the console was turned off or after 12 hours had passed.
As the Nintendo DS’s popularity faded and the Nintendo 3DS arrived to take its place, the game all but vanished, with only YouTube videos and a fan-made recreation serving as proof of its existence. So when a copy of the game suddenly popped up on auction on eBay, Pokémon fans were understandably shocked.
Video game archivist Tiramisu090401 was the first to sound the bugle on the surprise return. While the game was never released in cartridge form, eBay user catbearclaws seems to have their hands on the internal hard drive of one of the kiosks players could download the game from. As of writing, the best offer on the game sits at a whopping $9,104.06.
It’s not every day that a thought-to-be-lost download-only game resurfaces, and advocates for preservation are watching the bidding very closely. If the game ends up in the hands of a private collector, it’s possible that it will return to the annals of Pokémon history almost as soon as it returned from them.
RexProfessor, another video game archivist on Twitter, summed the issue up pretty well, expressing hope someone will make the game available to fans by releasing its download data.
In another post, RexProfessor also expressed some skepticism about whether the hard drive up on eBay actually contains PokéPark Fishing Contest DS at all. They point to a picture of one of the game’s kiosks, in which a “sub-chip” is mentioned on the display. This could mean that the game data was actually stored in a Game Boy Advance cartridge, and that the hard drive may only be able to share the game’s download data.
We’ll only know for sure once the bidding for it ends. If the game really is in there, I share RexProfessor’s hope that the person who buys it wants to preserve and share it. Even if the game is just a simple fishing simulator, it’s still an interesting piece of Pokémon’s history that shouldn’t be left to rot in a basement.
