Lost Nintendo DS Pokémon game you’ve never heard of sold for over £8,000

An eBay listing for a Nintendo DS development cartridge is speculated to hold a long-lost Pokémon game that was only temporarily available in 2005.

At 30 years old, the Pokémon franchise has seen a lot, and we do mean a lot, of video games beyond the nine mainline entries that kickstart each generation, such as Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and next year’s Pokémon Winds and Waves.

Among its copious spin-offs, some have left a significant impression on the fanbase, like the Mystery Dungeon games and Pokémon Stadium (which has been succeeded by Pokémon Champions), while others have faded into obscurity.

One of these spin-offs is so obscure and so rare, that it was considered lost media by the Pokémon community… until it was rediscovered on eBay and sold for over €9,000.

The game in question is called PokéPark: Fishing Rally DS and we don’t blame you if you’ve never heard of it, as not only was it never made available outside of Japan and Taiwan, but it also wasn’t sold at retail.

Instead, you could only download the game to your Nintendo DS by visiting certain physical locations and it was only distributed for a limited time in 2005.

On top of that, it was a temporary download, meaning it would vanish from your system once you turned the DS off or after a time limit expired, which is why the game has long been regarded as lost media.

Last week, however, an eBay listing for a Nintendo DS Development/Test Cartridge popped up and soon made the rounds among Pokémon fans as, according to Tiramisu090401 on X, the Japanese text written on the cartridge mentions ‘Poké Park Let’s Play DS.’

There’s little else the title could be referring to (there are two other games titled PokéPark but they’re for the Wii) so the immediate assumption is that the cartridge contains the DS game itself or perhaps the software required for distributing it, but no one knows for sure until the person that bought it shares their findings.

‘It says ‘Poké Park Let’s Play DS,’ so it’s definitely related, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s really a cartridge with the function to distribute the software itself. It says ‘Ranking Ishin’ on the screen, so there’s also the possibility that it was a cartridge for managing the ranking reception and transmission,’ explains Tiramisu090401.

Whatever the case, the cartridge has since been sold for €9,505, which is about £8,136, to an unknown buyer. So, the hope is that whoever bought it will share their findings.

The hope is that the cartridge does contain the original software and thus will allow the game to be preserved or even become more widely playable.

As for what PokéPark: Fishing Rally DS is, as the name suggests it’s a simple fishing game where you can catch various water type pokémon and are graded on the size and rarity of each one.

It’s about as deep as the shallow end of a swimming pool, but rarities such as this can sell for a lot of money. In fact, Nintendo is responsible for many of the rarest game cartridges throughout history, as a result of distributing them solely at events and competitions.

The most noteworthy example is the NES cartridge for the Nintendo World Championships in 1990, which was only given to the participants and contains modified versions of Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and Rad Racer.

One eBay listing has the cartridge going for $175,000 (about £130,000), but one of the even rarer gold variants was marked at $207,400 (about £154,000) in 2024.

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