The lengths fans will go for any scrap of Pokémon ephemera has hit a fever pitch over the last few years. With every card, pin and plush toy sparking a stampede, one incredibly lucky collector is boasting a remarkable find. Confirmed to IGN, Daniel Quadri has come into possession of the only known playable copy of PokéPark: Tsuri Taikai, a long lost Nintendo DS exclusive made all the more elusive that it was only available to download locally at a 2005 theme park.
“Preserving a game like this means so much to me,” collector Quadri tells IGN. “After years of fans wondering if it would ever be playable again, it felt surreal to turn on my DS and spend a quiet moment fishing, then feel that rush when I reeled in a Gyarados. For a moment, I got to feel what it must have been like to play it at PokéPark in 2005.”
PokéPark: Tsuri Taikai, or PokéPark: Fishing Rally, was a mini game available exclusively available on the Nintendo DS to in-person attendees of a pop-up theme park in Nagoya during the summer of 2005. Similar to a stamp rally, or a proto-Pokémon Go, players could traverse the Costco parking lot-sized attraction and catch water-based pocket monsters. It could only be downloaded through the DS’ local wifi features, later made available at certain Pokémon Center stores throughout Japan. However, the main reason it has remained so elusive is because the game was programmed to self destruct, deleting itself after a 12 hour period or once the handheld was reset.
Demo builds and eBay listings have emerged over the years, but Quadri’s cartridge, which he hasn’t elaborated the source of, appears to be the only confirmed fully playable copy. Quadri sent his cart to the contentious PSA for formal grading, but has also expressed an interest in helping preserve Fishing Rally, able to share the file to other DS systems.
“Imagine being one of those kids and finding out years later that the game you played that day had become a piece of lost Pokémon media,” says Quadri. “With this cartridge in my DS, I can recreate that experience today.”
