What is the Global Trade Station?

The Global Trade Station, the GTS, opened with Pokémon Diamond and Pearl in 2006 as the trading floor of the new Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. In Diamond and Pearl it is a building in Jubilife City with a spinning globe inside; in Platinum, HeartGold and SoulSilver the same service sits inside the larger Global Terminal, and in Generation V it moved into every Pokémon Center. For the first time, a trade no longer needed two players awake at the same moment.

The system worked like a classified ad. You deposited one Pokémon and named the species, level and gender you wanted in return, or browsed what the world had left on the shelf. You could only ask for Pokémon your Pokédex had already seen, which kept the shelf grounded in your own progress. Trades completed while you were away, and a timing flaw in the deposit save even let sharp players clone Pokémon, an open secret of the era.

The GTS also became famous for its dreamers: shelves full of ordinary Pokémon asking for legendaries, and requests for impossible creatures, like a level 9 or under Mewtwo, that no honest player could ever fill.

Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection shut down on May 20, 2014, and the official GTS for Generations IV and V went dark with it. Fan-run servers keep a version of the shelf stocked today, but the original globe stopped spinning in 2014.