A German eBay seller is asking €7,999, about $9,100, for what appears to be a Nintendo DS development cartridge connected to PokePark Fishing Contest DS, a Pokémon minigame that fans and archivists have treated as missing for nearly two decades.
The eBay listing shows a large DS development and testing cartridge photographed from the front and back, along with an image of the cartridge running on Nintendo DS hardware. The seller, using the account name catbearpaws, says the item came from a private lot and is being sold as-is. The listing does not promise that the cartridge works, that it is compatible with any particular hardware, or that its history can be verified.
Japanese game archaeology enthusiast Yoshino @ Federation, associated with renpou.com, drew attention to the auction on social media and described its significance to preservation-minded game fans.
What is PokePark Fishing Contest DS?
PokePark Fishing Contest DS was a download-only Nintendo DS fishing minigame distributed at PokePark 2005, a short-lived Pokémon theme park event in Japan. Attendees could receive the game on a DS handheld, but the copy was temporary: it disappeared when the handheld was powered off or when a 12-hour limit expired, whichever came first.
That distribution method is the whole preservation problem. A normal retail cartridge can survive in a drawer for years. A temporary DS download handed out at a limited event gives archivists much less to work with, especially when the software was designed to erase itself from consumer hardware after use. In this case, “lost media” means the game was known to exist but had not been publicly preserved in a usable form.
What does the cartridge actually prove?
The evidence is suggestive, not conclusive. The auction photos include an on-screen Japanese-language message that machine translation describes as a high-score ranking communication program. A machine-translated reading of the screen appears to connect the development cartridge to “PokePark Fishing Contest DS” assets of some kind.
That does not yet mean a playable build of the fishing minigame can be launched, dumped, transmitted, or otherwise recovered from the hardware. The seller is not guaranteeing any of that, which is exactly the caveat collectors and archivists should care about before treating a $9,100 auction as a solved preservation story.
The listing showed a starting bid of €7,999 and less than three days remaining, with the seller also leaving open the possibility of offers through eBay’s Make Offer process. Catbearpaws’ eBay profile showed a 100% seller record, but that rating does not verify the cartridge’s contents or provenance.
If the cartridge does contain recoverable PokePark Fishing Contest DS material, it could be a rare route back to a game that was deliberately built to vanish from the devices that received it. For now, the confirmed news is narrower: a pricey DS development cartridge with apparent ties to the 2005 event has surfaced, and the hard archival questions remain unanswered.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
