At 8am on 1 March, 2014 Twitch completed Pokemon Red. It’s taken thousands of players working round the clock for 16 days to achieve but trainer Red beat Blue, the head of the Elite Four, the game’s final boss.
But it’s not over yet.
Fighting through the Elite Four, the team of Twitch players finally faced Blue, Red’s nemesis who appears throughout Pokemon. Blue played Blastoise, a water type pokemon, Twitch played AA-J, their Zapdos. Being an electric type pokemon the decision was super effective.
You can see how it played out for them:
It may look like the game was being played by an indecisive person with ADHD but what you’re seeing is thousands of players typing in Twitch chat what button they want the game to play. The anonymous host of the Twitch channel has wired up a Gameboy emulator to chat and it plucks a command from those entered and plays it in the game. So that’s why there’s a lot of going back, up, down, selecting, deselecting and finally action.
While there was a democracy mode implemented early on in Twitch Plays Pokemon, where a button press is only made after the most popular command is determined, Blue was beaten in anarchy mode where any command entered might be the one the game selects.. It’s a stunning achievement.
As Captain_Alaska says on Reddit, it’s cause for celebration:
If you’d like to know more about Twitch Plays Pokemon, Steve’s written up an ace summary of some of the highlights of the last two weeks.
The game’s not over, though. There’s a countdown on the Twitch channel saying a new adventure will begin shortly.