Lost self-deleting PokePark DS game surfaces on eBay for $9,100
A DS development cartridge said to hold PokePark Fishing Contest DS, a download-only game built to delete itself after 12 hours, is on eBay for about $9,100.
A Nintendo DS game built to erase itself, and considered lost media for close to 20 years, is now sitting on eBay. A German seller, catbearpaws, has listed and sold a DS development and test cartridge said to hold PokePark Fishing Contest DS for approx 9,505.00.
The reason this one matters is the reason it nearly disappeared. PokePark Fishing Contest DS was never sold on a cartridge. It was a download-only title handed out through DS Download Play to people attending the PokePark theme park in Japan in 2005, and it was designed to delete itself when the handheld powered off or after 12 hours, whichever came first. Only a high score sent to a server outlived a session. No ROM of it is known to exist, which is exactly why a physical dev cart carries this kind of price tag and this kind of interest from preservationists. The listing was flagged by Japanese game-archaeology enthusiast Yoshino @ Federation.
The seller isn’t guaranteeing the cartridge does anything. The on-screen proof in the listing is limited to a Japanese-language high-score ranking communication screen, and whether a playable version can be dumped, transmitted, or extracted from the hardware is unknown. That is the whole story with lost media. The artifact resurfacing is not the same as the game being saved. Only time will tell if this ends up being anything special or not.