We knew Twitch Plays Pokemon was big, it attracted more than a million players, but some of the stats Twitch are revealing about the event are staggering. The total viewing time for the all the various eyes that watched the stream comes to over a billion minutes. Conservatively, that’s more than 1,900 years of stream viewed.
Not bad for what looked like Pokemon being played by a forgetful, fidgety four year-old.
The players completed Pokemon Red yesterday. When you line all the stats up it’s enough to make your brain gurgle. Over the 16 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds.it took to complete Pokemon Red, 1,165,140 players entered more than 122,000,000 commands, while another 9 million looked on. All told more the stream accrued more than 36 million views, amounting to more than 1 billion minutes watched.
Numbers: don’t you just love ‘em.
If you didn’t take part in the event, essentially it was like watching the old adage of a million monkeys working for an infinite amount of time creating the complete works of Shakespeare. An old gameboy emulator was hooked up to stream Pokemon Red to Twitch and accept commands typed into the chat box.
Thousands of players would be frantically typing ‘up’, ‘left’, ‘A’, etc into chat and the emulator would take one and enter it into the game. It became so confused that eventually democracy mode was introduced.
Democracy mode would take in all the submitted instructions and output the most popular – it was to help the players get through difficult areas where a wrong turn would see you sent back to square one of a dungeon.
Anarchy mode remained though and the game was completed in that way.
Since the end of Pokemon Red the stream has begun anew, this time with Pokemon Crystal loaded into the emulator. You can take part on the Twitch channel.
Cheers to Twitch for releasing the stats.