YouTuber Purple Thunder has spent years making videos about the archeology of Pokemon save files, buying up old used cartridges and seeing what discoveries those old save files contain. The latest find is perhaps the most heartwarming, as Purple Thunder has just reunited a 17-year-old 300-hour Pokemon Diamond save file with its original owner, who never wanted to part with it in the first place.
As Purple Thunder explains in recent videohe bought a copy of Pokemon Diamond on eBay, which was slightly reduced in price from the usual used price. Although the game was complete, it was also full of holes. There were literally a ton of holes punched in the DS cart. But the cartridge was declared working, and indeed it was, even though the cart loaded onto the DS Purple Thunder looked like a mess. In the end.
Now Purple Thunder says he's constantly getting messages from trolls claiming to be the original owners of these saves, so he's gone to work interrogating this supposed Marcus about the file's contents. Granted, the answers were shaky—I know it's hard for me to remember every detail of my childhood Pokemon saves—but the supposed Marcus did provide some obvious details about how the cart got into those holes.
“I was in the process of transitioning my Pokemon” to the next generation, Marcus explained, “when my little Shih Tzu dog, who I then called Scrappy, took over the game and I couldn’t get it to work anymore. I thought they were all lost, and at that moment I saved the game as a memory.”
The other details were enough for Purple Thunder to take the rather ridiculous risk of flying from Europe to a small town in Alabama to meet Marcus in person. “What kind of idiot travels 12 hours to meet a guy he doesn't know to talk about a 20 year old Pokemon game?” he asks at one point in the video. Well, Purple Thunder actually met Marcus in a slowly crumbling Alabama mall and became convinced pretty quickly that he was, in fact, the real deal.
“My wife, we had been married for about a year at this point, she was in a serious car accident that completely totaled the car,” Marcus explained at the meeting. “She was out of work. I actually got fired from my job for leaving early to go to the hospital to check on her because I was working in a factory at the time and in a place like that you can be replaced.”
He continues, “My Pokemon games cost about $1,800. I ended up pawning them with all due care to pay them all back to help cover the bills until we got back on our feet. I don't know where he went from his store. I think he probably sold them to old game stores and they went to who knows where.”
Thus, the old cartridges were scattered to the winds before Marcus had a chance to retrieve them from the pawn shop, and he was only able to reunite with it thanks to the fact that he came across the previous Purple Thunder cartridge. YouTube video.
“You never know what can happen,” says Marcus. “Perhaps you are like me and are trying to get rid of them. You will have to go through hard times, lose your collection and the like, or you will have to sell it to make money. Who knows? Sometimes things have a strange way of coming full circle.”
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