Twitch Plays Pokémon
It holds the Guinness World Record for having "the most users to input a command to play a live streamed videogame" with 1,165,140 participants.
[1] The concept was developed by an anonymous Australian programmer and launched on 12 February 2014, starting with the game Pokémon Red.
[3] The experiment was met with attention by media outlets and staff members of Twitch for its interactivity, its erratic and chaotic nature, the unique challenges faced by players due to the mechanics of its system, and the community and memes developed by participants.
Following the completion of Red, the broadcaster continued the channel with many other games in the Pokémon series along with unofficial ROM hacks.
matches),[4] and described as a social experiment, the system used by the stream was coded by an anonymous Australian programmer, colloquially known as the "Streamer", consisting of an IRC bot written in Python and the Game Boy emulator VisualBoyAdvance.
The script captures specific case-insensitive messages (directional commands, "B", "A", "select", and "start") sent into the stream's chat room by users, and sends them to the emulator as button input, thus controlling the game.
The Streamer chose Pokémon Red and Blue for the project, citing nostalgia for the early games,[5] the fact that "Even when played very poorly it is difficult not to make progress in Pokémon",[6] and because its current control structure "[wouldn't] work with any genre that isn't a JRPG", particularly targeting its "forgiving" turn-based structure and lack of reaction-based gameplay, compensating for the large amount of input lag between the game and the stream.
[5][7][8][9][10][11] The erratic nature of the control scheme has made the game longer and harder to play than under normal circumstances; an Ars Technica writer commented that "(Red) gets stuck in corners.
Commands stream in from the chat channel faster than the game can possibly process them, making progress difficult-to-impossible even without the lag factor or the 'help' of gleeful trolls."
Recurring difficulties have occurred with areas of the game involving mazes and ledges (areas with the latter taking as long as several hours to navigate due to users intentionally sending "down" commands to jump off the ledges), the accidental release (permanent deletion) of several Pokémon (including an incident referred to as "Bloody Sunday," where a total of twelve Pokémon were accidentally released whilst trying to obtain a Zapdos from the PC),[12] and users repeatedly sending "start" commands to open the pause menu, often followed by opening the character's inventory to select random items.
[15] Despite the seemingly erratic process of playing the game, players have attempted to collaborate and strategize through various means, including infographics and a user script which hides command messages from the chat window to allow conversation.
[18] On 18 February 2014, after encountering major difficulties with a puzzle in the Team Rocket hideout, a new mechanic was introduced in an effort to make the game easier to play, Democracy mode.
This change was considered divisive by players, who believed that Democracy mode conflicted with the original concept of the stream and eliminated the potential for randomness which had helped to drive the elaborate narrative and mythology that had built up around the playthrough.
As there was no PC-based emulator for the 3DS at the time, the stream was conducted on actual 3DS hardware using a hardware modification known as the 3DS Streaming Console with External Control Interface (3xtDS); developed by Reddit user dekuNukem, also known as Twitch_plays_3ds (who has also designed an automated rig for "chaining" and detecting "shiny" Pokémon),[32] the mod allows direct control of inputs on the device via a USB-based interface, and added the video output required for capturing the screens' content.
[6] However, the stream quickly went viral after that, reaching a total viewership of around 175,000 by 14 February (when players managed to beat the first of eight Gym leaders).
[9][10][11] On the completion of Red, the channel had reached 36 million total views, with a peak concurrent viewership of 120,000, and an estimated 658,000 had participated.
[1] The large amount of activity on the stream resulted in "enormous (and unforeseen) stress" on Twitch's chat system, requiring the site's engineers to move the stream's chat to a higher-capacity server normally used during major e-sports events, while working on improving the infrastructure's scalability.
[42] The developer himself said, "I didn't think it was going to be this popular, I thought it would gain only a small group of dedicated viewers and many others would check it out briefly before moving on to other things.
Two Pokémon that were obtained early in the game, and then later accidentally released were the Charmeleon and Rattata, "ABBBBBBK(" and "JLVWNNOOOO", further nicknamed "Abby" and "Jay Leno".
[45] Media outlets have described the proceedings of the game as being "mesmerizing," "miraculous," and "beautiful chaos," with one viewer comparing it to "watching a car crash in slow motion.
"[4][13][14] Ars Technica felt that it encapsulated "the best and worst qualities of our user-driven, novelty-hungry age," providing hours of arguable time-wasting entertainment through a word-of-mouth viral distribution.
[77] On March 1, 2024, the official Pokémon Instagram account posted a video of various Omastar and Omanyte to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the original run’s completion.
[citation needed] During the interim, the stream showed Harvest Moon GB, Pokkén Tournament, EarthBound, Robopon Sun, and save states of the first four runs in reverse order.
