Watch 70,000 People Control One Pokemon Game

UPDATE (02/19): Apparently the Twitch chat service crashed a few times yesterday due to the high volume of traffic in the channel. At some points yesterday the stream had over 100,000 viewers, which is almost expected of popular streams such as League of Legends, but is unprecedented in channels this young. The real problem isn’t the high viewer traffic though, it’s that the chat has nearly quadruple the activity of a normal channel. 

For those of you who want to know more about the massive, massive community forming over this little social experiment, a lot of fan art, general reactions to the events in the game, and other media can be found on Reddit. There’s also a section there with live updates for people who don’t want to sink hours and hours into watching the steam – although a lot of the joy comes from watching Red stumble around everywhere. And here’s a handy post with instructions for filtering out the commands being sent to the game, so that the Twitch chat functions more like a chat room and less like a spam flood. 

More updates to follow as the game progresses. As I type this, Red has been renaming nearly every Pokemon in his possession with the Name Rater. Have to say, my favorite so far was when the recently caught Zubat was changed from “—” to “AAAAA” to “JJSSSSS-” But hey, roughly 80,000 people can only do so much.

ORIGINAL POST: One of the most hilariously frustrating things I’ve seen in a quite a long time, an anonymous twitch.tv user has combined an emulated copy of Pokemon Red and an IRC chatbot to create a version of the game that can take commands from viewers in the channel’s chat room.

Currently, the game is taking commands from over 70,000 people.

I’m honestly shocked that they’ve gotten as far as they have, with a couple badges under their belt and a few Pokemon at their side, they’ve come a decently long way in the four days since the stream went live. At the time of this writing they’re stuck in the Team Rocket Hideout, and continiously come achingly close to the end…only to end up backtracking for a while.

For those that want to see some of the highlights that have happened (or will happen, if you get screen-punchingly mad watching the live feed), the twitchplayspokemon profile page will be occasionally updated with clips from the stream. 

It’s a very interesting social experiment, and I’m interested to find out how far viewers will be able to get through the game before the creator has to step in and fix some fatal mistake. 

Check out the steam for yourself here.