Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) was a 2014 social experiment on Twitch in which an emulator ran Pokémon Red using commands typed by viewers into the channel’s chat. Tens of thousands of people pressing buttons at once eventually beat the game, and the run produced its own mythology: the Helix Fossil, Bird Jesus and the anarchy-versus-democracy fight.
Quick Facts
| Ran | February 12 – March 1, 2014 (Guinness) |
| Game | Pokémon Red |
| Completion time | 16 days, 7 hours, 50 minutes, 19 seconds (Wikipedia) |
| Participants | 1,165,140, a Guinness World Record for the most users to input a command to play a live streamed videogame |
| Peak simultaneous participants | 121,000 (Twitch estimate, via Wikipedia) |
| Total views | 55 million during the experiment (via Wikipedia) |
| Award | Best Fan Creation, The Game Awards, December 5, 2014 (via Wikipedia) |
Origin
The stream was built by an anonymous Australian programmer, known as “the streamer”, and launched on February 12, 2014 (Wikipedia). An IRC bot written in Python read chat messages such as directions, A, B, Start and Select and passed them to the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. The streamer said Pokémon suited the format because even very poor play still makes progress, and its turn-based structure tolerates the stream’s input lag.
The result was chaos. Writing on February 18, 2014, Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham described the player character Red: “He gets stuck in corners. He walks in circles, compulsively checking his Pokédex and saving over and over again.”
How It Played Out
- February 18, 2014: democracy mode. After players got stuck in the Team Rocket hideout, the streamer added a voting mode that tallied inputs over a period and executed the winner. Many players protested by spamming “start9”, which opened and closed the pause menu nine times (Wikipedia). The streamer then let chat vote between anarchy, where commands go straight through, and democracy, where users vote on inputs (Polygon, February 20, 2014).
- February 23, 2014: Bloody Sunday. On the eleventh day, players accidentally released a dozen captured Pokémon, deleting them from the game.
- March 1, 2014: the win. The game was completed after more than 16 continuous days of play.
- March 2, 2014: next game. The channel moved on to Pokémon Crystal, and later to many other Pokémon games and ROM hacks.
The Lore
| Name | What it was |
|---|---|
| Lord Helix (Helix Fossil) | An item in Red’s inventory, selected so often it became an inside joke and then the players’ mock religion; fans published “bibles” for it |
| Dome Fossil | Its counterpart, treated as the deity of democracy-mode supporters |
| Bird Jesus | The team’s Pidgeot, one of its highest-level and most successful Pokémon |
| AA-j, “Archangel of Justice” | The team’s Zapdos, also called “Anarchy Bird” |
| The False Prophet | A Flareon caught by accident instead of the Vaporeon the team needed for Surf |
| Abby and Jay Leno | Nicknames for a Charmeleon and Rattata that were later accidentally released |
Source: Wikipedia.
Legacy
TPP inspired crowd-played streams of many other games, the general format covered on #TwitchPlays. The original streamer stepped down as lead on November 22, 2017, handing control to another collaborator. On March 1, 2024, the official Pokémon Instagram account marked the 10th anniversary of the Red run’s completion, and on February 25, 2025 Anthropic began streaming Claude Plays Pokémon, an homage in which its AI model plays Pokémon Red (all per Wikipedia).
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon
- https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-participants-on-a-single-player-online-videogame
- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/02/the-bizarre-mind-numbing-mesmerizing-beauty-of-twitch-plays-pokemon/
- http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/20/5428398/twitch-plays-pokemon-democracy-vs-anarchy