YouTube blogger Purple Thunder has been making "Pokémon" archive archeology videos for many years - acquiring second-hand old cassettes and digging out the stories hidden in these ancient archives. And his latest discovery may be the heartwarming one: Purple Thunder has just returned a 17-year-old, 300-hour archive of "Pokémon: Diamond" to the original owner who never thought of being separated from it.
As Purple Thunder explained in a recent video, he found a copy of Pokémon Diamond on eBay for a slightly lower price than the typical second-hand price. The game has all the accessories, but the cartridge itself is full of holes—yes, there are several holes punched into the Nintendo DS cartridge. However, the seller noted that the cartridge could be used normally, and despite its horrible appearance, Purple Thunder's DS eventually successfully read it.
The archive itself is not particularly eye-catching, except that it is played quite thoroughly - since its creation on June 30, 2008, the player "Marcus" has played nearly 300 hours. Even so, Purple Thunder made a video for it, and eventually he was contacted by someone who called himself Marcus.
Purple Thunder stated that he often received messages from pranksters claiming to be the original owners of these archives, so he began to carefully interrogate the details of the "Marcus" archive. The answer was understandably vague - I'm sure it would be hard for me to remember every detail of my childhood Pokémon saves - but the man who called himself Marcus did provide some specific information about the origin of the holes in the cartridge.
"I was in the process of transferring my Pokémon to a new generation of games," Marcus explains, "and my Shih Tzu named Scrappy took the cartridge and I couldn't get it to work properly. I thought all the Pokémon were lost, and I've been keeping the cartridge as a souvenir ever since."
Other details were enough for Purple Thunder to take a pretty crazy risk: flying from Europe to a small town in Alabama to meet Marcus in person. "What fool would spend 12 hours meeting a stranger just to talk about a Pokémon game from 20 years ago?" he laughed at himself at one point in the video. However, Purple Thunder finally met Marcus in a slightly rundown mall in Alabama, and was quickly convinced that he was the real owner of the archive.
"My wife and I had only been married for about a year when she was in a serious car accident and her car was completely totaled," Marcus recalled when we met. "She couldn't work because of it. And I was fired from my job because I left work early to go to the hospital to see her - I was working in a factory at the time, and anyone could be replaced in that kind of place."
He continued: "My Pokémon games were worth a total of $1,800. To pay the bills until we got back on our feet, I ended up pawning them all with the intention of redeeming them later. I don't know where the cartridges ended up from the pawn shop. I guess the pawn shop owner probably sold them to a used game store and then disappeared."
So before Marcus had a chance to redeem the cartridges from the pawn shop, they were scattered all over the place. The reason why he was able to reunite with this archive was because he accidentally came across a YouTube video previously released by Purple Thunder.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” Marcus said. “You might be like me and have to give up something you love. Go through hard times and lose your collection or sell it to make ends meet. Who knows? Sometimes things just come full circle and end up back where they started.”