Antonio 🔎 P.

Pokémon once made a game that deleted itself the second you turned off your Nintendo DS. One copy survived 21 years, and the guy who owns it just had it sealed in a plastic case where nobody can play it. It was called PokéPark Fishing Rally. Back in 2005, Pokémon ran a pop-up theme park in Nagoya, Japan, and more than 4 million people went through it. If you brought your DS, a kiosk would beam this little fishing game onto it. You caught water Pokémon and your best scores went up on a leaderboard. The game disappeared the second you turned your DS off, and if you left it on, it wiped itself after 12 hours anyway. It vanished so completely because of where it lived. Download Play loaded the whole game into the DS's 4MB of RAM, and RAM only holds data while it has power. Pull the power and there's literally nothing left to recover. So once the park closed and the kiosks got boxed up, the game was basically extinct. For two decades all anyone had was screenshots and a couple of old gameplay videos. People wanted it back badly enough that a different PokéPark dev cart sold for around $11,000 this summer, just on the hope that the game might be on it. Then this week a collector showed IGN a cartridge that can still send the full game to other DS systems. It's the only known playable copy anywhere. PSA's head of video games got to play it, and then PSA sealed it in the case you see in the photo, with a label that just says AU, for authentic. What worries me is the cart itself. Zoom in and the sticker says DS Flash Card in Japanese. Flash memory stores every bit of data as a tiny electric charge trapped in a cell, and that charge slowly leaks out over the years no matter where the chip is sitting. Chipmakers usually only guarantee somewhere between 10 and 20 years without power. This cart is 21 years old. It still booted this year, which is great news, but nobody can promise it boots in 2036. The real fix is a dump, meaning the data copied onto a hard drive and a few backups where it can't fade. Making one now means cracking open the slab PSA just certified. So a game Pokémon built to last 12 hours has made it 21 years on luck alone, and now it's sitting in a case nobody's supposed to open.