Twitch Plays Pokemon – Tens Of Thousands Of People Play Pokemon Red At The Same Time

Over 12 Days ago, an anonymous Australian programmer began a Social experiment on the video streaming site Twitch by allowing any viewer of the stream the ability to input controls to an emulated copy of Pokemon Red. To input a control any viewer simply has to type out one of the original Gameboy’s button command into chat (up, down, left, right, start, select, A, B), and an IRC bot translates buttons said in chat into key presses.

The results have been what can only be described as mind blowing. At time of writing this article, the stream has had over 28,323,353 views with the highest recorded viewer count at once being over 75,000. The stream has gained the attention of numerous gaming sites including Gamespot, as well as mainstream media like the BBC, and even CNN.

Together, tens upon thousands of viewers all spam commands trying to get Red to his destination as a Pokémon master. Along the way they have encountered a magnitude of obstacles which would be easily overcome for a single player, but with over 50,000 individuals attempting to move at once, much hilarity has ensued as all precision flies out the window.

On day 5, the original uploader added a script which allows the players to vote to switch between normal simultaneous input (“Anarchy”) and a more co-ordinated mode (“democracy“) where the most common command after 20 seconds is executed. This was implemented after the stream got stuck in the Team Rocket HQ for over 24 hours. “Anarchy” appears to be the more favoured method of play, however “Democracy” was used to clear the Team Rocket HQ and has since been used to clear other more tricky sections like the Safari Zone.

The stream has sparked the creation of several memes and artwork. Mostly of particular events, and funny common occurrences which have taken place since the stream has been up. We’ve even seen a fictional religion spring into existence, complete with it’s own Jesus and False Prophet. I recommend the Know Your Meme Page for more information and some funny examples of memes that have come from events in the game.

Despite the utter chaos that is 50,000+ people all trying to move a single character at once. The game has made some significant progress. In 6 days the stream had acquired 4 badges, by 11 days the team had a Zapdos, 6 badges, and was heading to Pallet town to surf their way to Cinnabar Island.

For those interested, a full run down of all the progress has been recorded and kept up to date via a Google document.

If you haven’t had a chance to check it out until now, the stream is still very much in progress and can be found here.