Twitch Plays Pokémon

Origin: a chat box wired to a Game Boy

On February 12, 2014, an anonymous Australian programmer started a Twitch channel that did something nobody had attempted at scale: it let the chat play the game. A Python IRC bot read every message in the stream’s chat and, whenever a message matched a Game Boy input — up, down, left, right, a, b, start, select — passed it straight through to an emulator running Pokémon Red. A small web app displayed the commands scrolling past in real time.

There was no queue, no turn order and no filter. Everyone typing at once controlled the same character simultaneously. The creator later admitted he had not expected it to catch on.

What a game played by 70,000 hands looks like

Chaos, with lag. Inputs arrived seconds late and in contradictory directions, so the protagonist mostly spun on the spot, walked into walls and opened the menu at random. By February 20 the stream was averaging 60,000 to 70,000 concurrent viewers, with at least one in ten actually sending commands; the peak has been reported at over 100,000. Guinness World Records later recognised the run for the most users to input a command to play a live streamed videogame, at 1,165,140 participants.

The comedy came from the friction. A game a child can finish in a weekend became a multi-day siege because thousands of people could not agree which way to walk.

Anarchy vs Democracy

After the stream spent roughly a day trapped in a Team Rocket hideout maze — a floor of spinning tiles that punishes a single stray input — the operator introduced Democracy mode on February 18, 2014. Democracy tallied votes over roughly thirty-second windows and executed the winner; Anarchy passed everything straight through.

Chat revolted. Protesters spammed “start9” to jam the vote counter, and the system settled into a hybrid in which switching into Democracy required a supermajority while returning to Anarchy needed only a simple majority. It was an accidental and genuinely funny experiment in collective governance, and it was written up as one at the time.

The religion that formed in chat

The stream’s most remarkable output was lore. Because the constant random menu-opening kept surfacing the Helix Fossil, chat decided the item was a god — Lord Helix, consulted before every decision and eventually revived into an Omanyte. The Dome Fossil became the rival deity of the Democracy faction. The party’s Pidgeot, saddled with the garbled auto-nickname aaabaaajss, was canonised as Bird Jesus; a Flareon was denounced as the False Prophet.

On February 23 came Bloody Sunday: an attempt to withdraw Zapdos from the PC storage system went wrong and twelve Pokémon were released. Chat mourned in earnest, and fan art poured out for weeks.

The finish, and what it started

Pokémon Red was beaten on March 1, 2014, after 16 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds of unbroken play. The project won Best Fan Creation at The Game Awards in December 2014, and the channel carried on with Crystal, Emerald and a long tail of ROM hacks.

Its influence outlasts the viewer numbers. Twitch Plays Pokémon established “the crowd controls the game” as a permanent streaming format, and it remains the standard example of a chat room spontaneously generating mythology, factions and martyrs out of a Game Boy save file.