The game was Launched on the streaming service Twitch, with its creator hacking together a computer script That turned the website’s comment system into a controller for the 1996 Game Boy title.
Commenters simply type in one of the game’s eight commands to control the main character (up, down, left, right, A, B, start, or select) but the stream’s popularity has Proved its undoing, with massive numbers of gamers (reportedly as many as 50,000) Attempting to play at once.
This has turned the Relatively easy title into a chaotic challenge, and attracted the more than five million viewers over its four-day run. One commenter on Reddit Compared it to “watching a car crash in ultra-slow motion” but with thou sands of people in the vehicle, all shouting advice and trying to grab the wheel at the sametime.
Have a look below to see the action for yourself. The game is on the left, and the stream on the right shows the incoming commands.
Watch live video from TwitchPlaysPokemon on www.twitch.tv
The stream was set up by an anonymous Australian programmer who told gaming website Polygon That he just “put it up to see how people would respond.”
When Deciding Which game would be most Appropriate for the unique crowd-controlled mechanism, the creator says That he chose Pokémon for its “turn-based gameplay, forgiving nature and its lack of reaction-based gameplay (Which isn’ta compatible with [the roughly 20 seconds] of Twitch law). “
The stream has alreadycreated generated a number of in-jokes as simple tasks are rendered near impossible thanks to the game’s un-Coordinated horde of players.
A section of the game where the protagonist has to navigate a series of ledges Proved Particularly Difficult as a single badly timed (or maliciously entered) direction late the player back to the beginning of a maze. Similarly, the second item in the player’s bag (a Helix Fossil That has no purpose until much later in the game) has been selected by accident so frequently thatusers have Begun Referring to it as a deity.
The game’s creator has saidthat he is going to let it run “24/7″ but has little hope of seeing a full play-through “without much better coordination.”
Watching the stream casually for a few minutes Confirms this somewhat pessimistic outlook (Red, the main character spends a lot of his time walking into walls and has a fair Amount of difficulty getting through doors) but amazingly, the Internet’s Efforts have managed to get them half-way through the game in just four days. It might not be the most meaningful example of collective human endeavor but it’s proof That if anything can bind together the internet, it’s a game of Pokémon.
You can watch (and Participate) at ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon’
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