"Every Pokemon has a history": The real-life Pokemon Rescue team determined to save fans' old 'mons isn't just dedicated to game preservation, but saving memories

Perhaps the most special thing about Pokemon is the way it resonates with each fan in a deeply personal, unique way. Everyone holds onto those cherished memories of their first game, their first Pokemon, their original favorites, and time spent playing with their friends. Those memories are what one group of fans are doing their best to preserve with their unofficial Pokemon Rescue project.

"Every Pokemon has a history," content creator and Pokemon Rescue lead Professor Rex tells me as we sit in front of his two enormous cases of Nintendo hardware and old Pokemon games at the series' recent Europe International Championships. "And the coolest thing about the franchise is that it doesn't just end when you finish the game, you get to continue, if you choose. You can continue to make memories with that Pokemon, for all we know, forever."

Gotta save 'em all

Wandering outside the halls of EUIC 2026, it's hard to miss the setup that Rex and his brother, Professor Tops, have created. Their two huge Pelican cases, filled with retro goodness that the two siblings have been collecting for over 10 years, look like high-tech first-aid kits, with inspiration taken from the official Pokemon Rescue Team event held in Japan in 2017, which helped players transfer their old Pokemon up to Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, the newest games at the time.

Ads released for the event showed people acting like paramedics, dramatically recovering old Pokemon games from fans' homes and anxiously completing the transfer processes to bring the 'mons over to the 3DS installments. Rex, Tops, and their friends offer the same service – albeit without the emergency services roleplay – and now with the extra steps required to bring a Pokemon to Pokemon Home on the Switch and Switch 2, where they can be safely stored in the cloud or moved into the Switch games that they feature in.

"I just thought that [Pokemon Rescue Team] was the coolest piece of media that The Pokemon Company had ever put out," Rex says, explaining its influence. "There hasn't been any other game in history where you could take something that's 20 years old and continue to use it in a brand new game. Like, there's a very few select games that have the ability where you can have your save data influence the story in the second game, but not 10 games later.

"And then they made those trailers, and never talked about it again. Like, Pokemon Home exists, but there's never been a trailer for Pokemon Home about 'you can bring your childhood Pokemon and use it on the Switch,' and I think that's so cool."

"The main concept from the trailer is helping people transfer their old Pokemon to the new games," Tops adds. "But again, we wanted to add our own flair to it, and that's where we kind of got to the point where we are now, where we have the ability to do that, but also the ability to add new memories to people through older connections with the game."

Rex likens his service to the in-store Pokemon events of old, which required you to bring your game and handheld to receive special 'mons, and having now been witness to both, I can definitely say that the vibe is the same. The Pokemon Rescue team even offers a personalized flair with special certificates – inspired by the certificates of authenticity for the Generation 1 event Mew – recording the name of the Pokemon and date it was rescued for each person to take home. "If one person holds onto it as something that means something to them, win. That's a win to me," Rex says.

From the cases of carefully packaged game cartridges and hardware – including a massive collection of the many different language versions of the games – to the concept of Pokemon Rescue itself, this whole project is essentially a subsection of game preservation, and one that ends up being deeply personal to anyone who interacts with it.

"I have spent thousands and thousands of dollars of my own money preserving pieces of Pokemon history that would have been lost otherwise, because of the fact that everybody has a little memory that means something to them," Rex says. "There's a lot of pieces of Pokemon history that just get thrown out, literally ripped up and thrown in the trash. So yeah, game preservation is huge for me."

Each Pokemon that Rex and his team rescue essentially runs the risk of becoming a form of lost media, if not for the intervention. "We rescued a Spinda in California. It was the first Pokemon that we rescued, and it was a shiny Spinda," Rex begins. For those uninitiated, shiny Pokemon are extremely rare, differently colored variants of Pokemon that, from Generations 5 and below, only have a 1/8,192 chance of appearing. What's more, Spinda is an extremely unique Pokemon because there are over four billion possible spot patterns it can have.

"It was somebody's first shiny, and every single Spinda that exists is unique," Rex continues. "I mean, every Pokemon is unique already, but literally, every Spinda looks different."

Not only that, but Tops adds that the Sapphire cartridge that the Spinda was rescued from "was on its last leg." He explains: "It looked like it had been through the wash, it had been stomped on, it looked like it was on its last run of the game. So if anything ever happened to that game, that Spinda would have been lost. So it's cool that you're able to preserve those things, even from games that are just barely holding on, because they're 20 years old."

That's on top of the impracticalities of transferring old Pokemon up to Home if you don't have a collection of hardware and software like the Rescue team's. Transferring Pokemon from a Generation 3 game is no easy feat, requiring a Nintendo DS or DS Lite, a Generation 4 game, a 3DS and Generation 5 Pokemon game, then either a Generation 6 or 7 game and the 3DS' Pokemon Bank and Poke Transporter apps, which are no longer available to download.

"You're looking at hundreds and hundreds of pounds of your own money being put up to try and do it, on top of not actually being able to do it anyways," Rex says. "So putting this all together is just like that step of making it more accessible to everybody, to be able to do the thing that Pokemon made that is so cool."

There's something about Pokemon that makes all this mean more. "Everybody has a Pokemon that made them fall in love with the game," Rex says. "You remember your first one, you remember your first event. And you also hear stories where people lost them." As far as he's concerned, "any little step I can take to just make it so that there's less of those stories and more of the stories of pulling out your phone and having your 20-year-old Pokemon," he's going to take it, and to some, that means even more than others.

"Right after [the 2025 Pokemon World Championships], I had the Rescue cases, and I was about to leave to go get dinner, and somebody ran up to me, and they just started crying right away," Rex tells me, immediately tearing up. "They played Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire with their dad as a kid, and they had a bunch of Pokemon that had their dad as the OT [original trainer].

"Their dad had a stroke and is now non-verbal, and she was taking care of him," he continues. "And she was like, 'I couldn't find my game, but I'm gonna tear my house apart, and I'm gonna find you at the next event that you're at, and I'm gonna bring those Pokemon somewhere safe.' So I brought these to Milwaukee, and I met up with them, and we brought those Pokemon up to Pokemon Home. She was crying most of the time, but then she went home, and she was able to show her dad Pokemon that they had caught together 20 years ago. And even though he couldn't say how cool it was, he was able to smile about it."

It's stories like that that are "exactly what it's all about," Tops adds, and it's impossible not to feel emotional too as I see how much the two brothers genuinely care about what they're doing and what difference they're making to fans around the world. Needless to say, Rex denies any notion that the Rescue project is in any way "performative," as has apparently been suggested before.

"Everybody that's here at an event like this [with] 10,000 people, every Pokemon Go event I've been to, tens of thousands of people, every single one of them has some reason they fell in love with the game," he says. "And maybe that was playing with your friends, playing with your family, escapism, there's something. And, I don't know, it's an honor to be able to be part of taking people on that next step in their Pokemon journey."

After all, that's something that the pair have been able to experience together growing up, from being "in the backseat of a car" and finding their first shiny Pokemon together (a Medicham in Pokemon Diamond, if you were wondering), to going to the store as kids and trying to memorize as much as possible from the Ruby and Sapphire game guides so that they could go home "finish the game together." Now, the Rescue project is the latest thing for the two to carry out together, which is "the best part."

That also means collecting more memories as they go – both their own, and from the people they help. "I collect stories. I love hearing people's stories about Pokemon," Rex smiles. "Every time somebody shares a story of their Pokemon journey with me, that's locked away in the important box."

"We had no idea this would be such a phenomenon": As Pokemon Red and Blue turn 30, here's how Game Freak created one of the most important RPGs of all time.