Sometimes a Pokémon fan goes to the ends of the earth to catch their favorite ‘mon. Usually it’s because they admire that monster and want to add them to their collection as a symbol of pride. For Professor Rex, however, catching a Shiny Golduck using 58 consoles at once was a matter of “math” as opposed to some deep love for the water-type duck monster.
“I love finding and documenting some of the rarest Pokémon to ever exist,” he tells Kotaku. “I love statistics as well so I spend far too much time thinking about rare Pokémon and what makes them rare.”
While Pokémon invokes a feeling of adventure and the power of friendship, its encounters—like those in many video games—are determined by dice rolls and background math. Part of the challenge of those early Pokémon games is walking through tall grass and surfing through the ocean in hopes that the Pokémon you’re looking for pops up in a random battle. That part of Pokémon-catching has disappeared in recent years as monsters show up in the overworld now, which means that searching for the rare, alternate-colored critters called Shinies in the older games remains a collector’s greatest challenge. Professor Rex, who created a massive setup of dozens of GameCubes and Wiis to shiny-hunt the rarest monsters in Pokémon, has become pretty efficient at finding these guys. After creating the setup to shiny-hunt a Chansey in FireRed and LeafGreen, which has a 1/806,000 chance of popping up in the game’s Safari Zone, he wanted a new challenge, and he planned to install a few more consoles to make it happen.
“As someone who has become something of an authority on the Safari Zone, my brother and I have participated in eight ‘Safari Week’ shiny hunting events, but with the Chansey Caught… there wasn’t much for me to search for,” Professor Rex says. “I wanted a target that I could hunt for years to come.”
Rex sought out a Pokémon game he could play with his GameCube and Wii setup. Luckily, Nintendo and Game Freak released Pokémon Box Ruby & Sapphire, which is a GameCube storage app that lets you keep your Pokémon from the Game Boy Advance games stashed away. Along with the storage functionality, it also allows you to play the original Ruby and Sapphire games on a television. It turns out, if you take the disc out after you’ve started playing the game, it can still be played to completion, meaning the disc can be used in another system at the same time. Or a few dozen, if you’re trying to play the game multiple times at once in search of a shiny.
But what was all this for? What is rarer than a Shiny Pokémon? What about a Shiny Pokémon that is already a rare spawn, and has an even rarer spawn when it’s underleveled? Golduck, the evolved form of Psyduck, is typically only obtainable when the water-type duck Pokémon reaches level 33, but there have been several points in the games at which you can sometimes find wild, underleveled versions of an evolved Pokémon at a level lower than they typically evolve. Golduck can be found at level 25 in the Safari Zone, and finding it at that level has, according to Rex’s research, a one-percent chance of spawning to begin with, and a one-in-16 chance that it will show up at level 25. Under the best possible circumstances, Rex estimates that a pink-billed, level 25 Golduck has a one-in-nine-million chance of showing up. So if he’s going to cover any ground, playing the game across 58 simultaneous instances of Ruby and Sapphire is one of the only ways he’ll make a dent in his hunt.
How is he able to play 58 systems at once? GameCube faithful will remember the Wavebird Controller, an early wireless controller that Nintendo put out in 2002 for the GameCube. It’s outdated tech by modern standards, but was nonetheless helpful for the shiny hunt.
“Unlike modern wireless controllers, the Wavebird communicates with radio waves – so if all of the receivers are set to the same radio channel – they can all send inputs to whatever system they are plugged into,” he says. “That allows for pretty-well unlimited scaling of how many systems we can control at once.”
Despite all his preparation and attempts, Professor Rex says that he hasn’t actually made any progress in the hunt.
“Between Safari Week 2025 (eight Shiny Psyducks Seen), and 2026 so far (six Shiny Psyducks seen), I’ve already encountered 14 shiny Psyducks that aren’t Golducks. And the worst part is – none of those ‘phases’ have brought me any close to my target. Shiny hunting isn’t cumulative. I’m actually exactly as close to the shiny as when I started.”
There’s no shiny Golduck in sight just yet, but Professor Rex says that it’s more about the chase at this stage.
“To be honest, I’m not sure I ever expect to get it,” Rex says. “It was more chosen as the craziest target I could come up with. A shiny hunt that I could work on forever.”
Though the golden goose of a level 25 Golduck is an ideal, Rex says that if he never sees that specific level, even one Shiny underleveled Golduck would suffice.
“All this press is making me think I might need to try to at least see one – but if I am being honest, I think any of the level 25-29 Golducks would be enough for me – though even they are still one in 1.8 million encounters,” he says. “Only time will tell if I’ll ever finish the hunt.”