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Twitch Plays Pokemon has beaten all Pokemon generations
We did it, everyone. Humanity has reached the highest state it will ever achieve, the pinnacle of our societal evolution. This week, Twitch Plays Pokemon completed Pokemon X, meaning that every generation of the Pokemon series has been conquered by the schizophrenic hivemind that is the TPP audience. Truly, we are ready for ascendance. The social experiment where thousands of Twitch viewers input commands to control a single character has gone on for nearly six months now, and though the main series has been mastered, the madness continues. At the time of writing, the TPP Twitch channel was still active, with audience members battling each other in Pokemon Stadium 2. Will Twitch Plays Pokemon return to the Hoenn region when Pokemon Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire hits shelves on November 21? We'll have to wait and find out. In the meantime, let us never forget this all started with a boy named Red and his Charmander, named ABBBBBBK(. Praise Helix. [Image: Twitch]
The nightmare returns as Twitch Plays Pokemon X / Y
The Twitch Plays Pokemon social phenomenon continues rolling along today, as the hivemind sets out to conquer the Kalos region of Pokemon X / Y. Not only is this the TPP project's final step to becoming a poke-master (which is to say that the group will have experienced all six generations of Pokemon once they beat it), but this time, rather than play an emulated version of the game like before, Twitch plays on a modified 3DS. This is a significant change because having an actual copy of the game and an actual 3DS system means being able to take advantage of Pokemon X / Y's online features. You think storing pokemon in the PC or releasing them to the wild was bad? Try dumping them on some hopeless stranger through a Wonder Trade. Chaos! Chaos reigns! The anonymous streamer in charge had the system's wireless functions turned off for an extended period of time, but it (currently) seems to be coming back. We're not ones to pick a side in whether or not Wi-Fi should be enabled, but someone out there managed to trade with the Twitch-controlled pokemon trainer to bestow upon them a "LADY HELIX." It's a sign. [Image: Twitch]
Twitch Plays Pokemon gambles with Pokemon Stadium 2
Gone are the days when Twitch Plays Pokemon was just a random crowd-play experiment based on a popular Game Boy RPG. Not only has the livestreamed game moved on to Pokemon Platinum for Nintendo DS, but it now features another game on the stream entirely: Pokemon Stadium 2 for Nintendo 64. Now, Twitch chatters can bet on battles between creatures in Pokemon Stadium 2, which act in completely random ways, all while participating in Twitch Plays Pokemon's ongoing quest to catch 'em all. The livestreamed game began in February with Pokemon Red, in which thousands of viewers were able to control the game using Twitch's embedded chat. The first game ended after two weeks, garnering 35 million viewers and countless memes and pieces of user-created lore. Now hovering around 2,500 concurrent viewers, Twitch Plays Pokemon is slowly approaching 60 million total viewers after having beaten four games in the Pokemon series. [Image: The Pokemon Company]
Hearthmind brings the 'Twitch Plays' phenomenon to Hearthstone
Ever since Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft launched on PC and Mac in March, we've been asking ourselves one question: How would this strategic card game behave if a democratic octopus were in control? That question is now partially answered thanks to Hearthmind, a website that blends Blizzard's CCG with the livestreamed, crowd-play-style of control popularized by Twitch Plays Pokemon. Hearthmind isn't quite controlled the same way Twitch Plays Pokemon is though, as players vote on actions in the game by dragging their mouse cursor over the playing field as opposed to entering commands in the stream's chat. An action is picked by the game every five seconds, so it retains a somewhat brisk pace compared to its Pokemon-based counterpart. As of this writing, the stream, powered by Hitbox as opposed to Twitch, is hovering around 100 participants. Hearthstone just launched on iOS for free this month after Blizzard detailed the game's single player campaign. An Android port of the game is still in the works. [Image: Blizzard Entertainment]
PAX East 2014: Upsilon Circuit is an MMO like no other
A lot of what I see in the MMO industry is fairly predictable. That's not an insult; it's just that most of the new games you see are either a result of elegant mechanics solving a problem that's always been there or a new take on an old system, and that's OK. There's nothing wrong with taking old favorites and refining them. But then I see something like Upsilon Circuit and I wind up being completely blown away because the very idea is a fundamental rewriting of how we understand MMOs. Upsilon Circuit is a new game currently in very early development from indie studio Robot Loves Kitty (of Legend of Dungeon fame), and when I say early, I do mean early. The animations are rough, the build is very much in a proof-of-concept stage rather than a fully playable state, and none of that matters. The game is the love child of Twitch Plays Pokémon, the Hunger Games, and Diablo III, a game that not only encourages streaming but demands it while interacting with the audience
Twitch Plays Pokemon continues, 30k tune in for start of Emerald
After more than a month of combined playtime and a bajillion-and-one views between Pokemon Red and Pokemon Crystal, the Twitch Plays Pokemon community has moved on to Pokemon Emerald. Approximately 30,000 poke-trainers showed up for the start of the Hoenn region adventure, which has the added feature of a display that shows the party's current pokemon. It's okay everyone, we don't need to press start to see who's in the party now and listen to Bulbasaur's cry for 15 minutes! The first TPP playthrough brought us gods and religions, the second gave us a battle against those same deified creatures. The third playthrough's running meme thus far seems to be that the player character, a female avatar named "A" (short for "Anarchy"), is a psychopathic murderer. Because sure, why not. [Image: Twitch]
Twitch Plays Pokemon given deadline to beat their former god [Update]
Twitch Plays Pokemon, a social phenomenon in which thousands of Twitch users simultaneously wrestle for control of an emulated Pokemon game, may be nearing its end. The host of the stream has given the channel a deadline of next Friday, March 21. If they can't beat a certain trainer by that point, the host has declared there will be no stream of the next game in the series, Pokemon Emerald. That's not the only surprise waiting for those just tuning in, however. After besting Pokemon Red in just more than two weeks' time, the stream team moved to Pokemon Crystal. Those familiar with Crystal know that at the end of the game, it's possible to challenge the trainer from Pokemon Red. Indeed, this is precisely the trainer that the TPP host challenged the stream to beat. Normally, Red has a Pikachu, Charizard, Blastoise, Venusaur, Snorlax and Espeon as his team. In the TPP version of Crystal however, he's been coded to have a Zapdos, Omastar, Pidgeot, Venomoth, Lapras and Nidoking - the same team that the TPP collective created and used to defeat the Elite Four in Pokemon Red. The running theme of TPP's runthrough of Crystal has been "No gods. No kings. Only 'mon." Fitting that now Twitch Plays Pokemon must destroy the gods they created. Update: Well, that didn't take long. Twitch Plays Pokemon have defeated Red and completed another poke-journey. Or have they? While there are still legendary pokemon out in the wild to find, capture or defeat, Crystal is, for all intents and purposes, beaten. Yet the stream, for now, remains online. Players seem lost, confused, directionless. It's almost as if thousands of voices could not agree on what to do next. Update 2: A countdown timer to Pokemon Emerald has been added to the stream. Looks like TPP will move to the Hoenn region on March 21, at 9:00 p.m. EST. [Image: Twitch]
Twitch Plays Pokemon breaking bad, now on Crystal
Twitch Plays Pokemon's romp through the Kanto region concluded with Pokemon Champion status yesterday, freeing protagonist Red from the playerbase's rule via thousands of button prompts. Dominating one region with a Pidgeot, Zapdos and Venemoth isn't enough for Twitch, though - it wants to be the very best, and continuing its campaign for glory this morning in Pokemon Crystal's Johto region seems like the next logical step. Progression will bear similarity to the jumbled process used for Pokemon Red, with many simultaneously guiding the journey of one. Previously, players voted whether the game would be played in Democracy mode, where players vote on every action, or Anarchy mode, where the game interpreted every command. This time, a countdown timer that marks the arrival of Democracy mode has been added. At the time of this writing, the stream also has over 80,000 concurrent viewers. The communal journey through Pokemon Red was made possible by the work of an anonymous programmer and has inspired a wealth of memes, religious themes and political debates. We've explored the social elements of the phenomenon, getting MIT associate professor T.L. Taylor's thoughts on why the project has connected with so many. It remains to be seen whether Pokemon Crystal will inspire its own installment of Pokelore, or if the previous campaign's highlights and Helix deity will keep the second adventure's direction from being as fresh as the first's bizarre, player-created story. [Image: The Pokemon Company]
Twitch Plays Pokémon... beats Pokémon
When is a single-player game an MMO? When you hook it up to a chat parser and let everyone fight for controls, much like wrestling with five other people to play a single-player game. Twitch Plays Pokémon has garnered a great deal of attention based on its quirky premise and execution, but all good things must come to an end. After 16 days of play, the game has finally concluded with victory for the multitudes. The channel is currently counting down to something happening on Sunday morning. Will it be a restart? Another Pokémon title? An attempt to use a similar premise on another game? No one knows. (Most theories involve a restart or the next generation of Pokémon titles, though.) You can keep an eye on the page to see what happens next, or you can just enjoy one of the strangest stories of turning a single-player game into a multiplayer online one... even if it was just for half a month.
Twitch Plays Pokemon final stats: 1.1 million players, 36 million views
Twitch has announced the final statistics for cultural phenomenon Twitch Plays Pokemon, which came to a dramatic close earlier today. And while only one pokemon trainer can be the very best, more than 1.1 million people tried. The actual number of TPP "players" - as in, those who entered commands in the game's chat - totaled 1,165,140, according to the Twitch official blog. As if that weren't quite ridiculous enough, here's some more rare candy to chew on: Total time: 16 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds Peak players: 121,000 Commands issued: More than 122 million Onlookers: More than 9 million Total views: More than 36 million Total minutes watched: More than 1 billion For reference, the total number of views is more than twice that of Shanghai, the city with the highest recorded population in the world. Granted those aren't all unique views, but that's still a freaking lot of views. Unofficial stats have also been collected by the community, for those who'd like to know just when each magical moment transpired. According to one account, it took Twitch Plays Pokemon 22 tries to beat the Elite Four. It only took them two tries to beat Blue, the game's archenemy. Two! The weight of TPP cannot be overstated - aside from the various memes and religions it's created, there's even a petition to have the US government officially recognize March 1 as Helix Day. Praise Helix. [Image: The Pokemon Company]
Joystiq Weekly: Titanfall, Thief review, Twitch Plays Pokemon and more
Welcome to Joystiq Weekly, a "too long; didn't read" of each week's biggest stories, reviews and original content. Each category's top story is introduced with a reactionary gif, because moving pictures aren't just for The Daily Prophet. This week's news of a new Tony Hawk game isn't exactly what we were hoping for, but it can't stop us from digging out our old cartridges and discs to revisit the series that made us mount real-life skateboards for the first time. Without the killer soundtracks and a focus on pulling off special moves that progressively got more insane with each entry, we might never have spent hours trying to learn how to ollie. Or earning fresh headaches from trying to drop into half pipes. Or building ramps out of scraps from the garage so we could grind our faces off on the pavement. Thankfully, a revitalization of childhood injury memories isn't the only thing the Joystiq Weekly has in store - news of a Titanfall bundle, reviews of Thief and Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare and a sociological exploration of Twitch Plays Pokemon are also available for your immediate consumption! Dive into this week's biggest moments in gaming right after the break. [Image: Robomodo]
Twitch slays Pokemon after two weeks of non-stop action [Update: New game on Sunday]
The livestreamed crowd-play event Twitch Plays Pokemon has ended, as thousands of players pooled their efforts to defeat the Elite Four in Pokemon Red. The game was completed after 16 days of consecutive play and saw over 35 million viewers during that time. Twitch Plays Pokemon is a Pokemon Red mod that allowed Twitch viewers to control the game's main character Red by entering commands in the streaming platform's chat window. The event began on February 12 and reached 75,000 concurrent viewers after five days of play. There were plenty of doubts that players would even be able to cross the Safari Zone in the game, let alone view its ending credits, though the game's creator told Joystiq that "even when played very poorly it is difficult to not make some progress in Pokemon." The community that gathered around Twitch Plays Pokemon upheld a narrative that extended beyond Pokemon Red's initial scope and included the Twitter-trending Bird Jesus (Pidgeot) and the spiritual consultant and deity Lord Helix (Omanyte). Joystiq also talked with MIT associate professor T.L. Taylor about the event's place in network and game culture, who said it tapped into "something I think is very compelling. So I don't think we're going to see [crowd-play] go away as a genre." Considering how entertaining this has been, we certainly hope not. Update: As it turns out, the Twitch Plays Pokemon stream now features a countdown timer ticking away roughly 26 hours and 25 minutes as of this writing that notes, "A new adventure will begin." That pegs the start of what seems to be the next version of Twitch Plays Pokemon at 7:00 a.m. EST Sunday morning. [Image: The Pokemon Company]
Twitch Plays Pokemon: Creating an oral history in real-time
When I began my phone call Sunday evening with T.L. Taylor, an associate professor of comparative media studies at MIT, I opted to check her loyalty to the one, true Helix god. "All sensible people are," she joked. Even when observing Twitch Plays Pokemon from an academic standpoint, it's easy to get wrapped up in the emerging community-crafted narrative surrounding the live, always-on event. The crowd-created stories in Twitch Plays Pokemon are enough to fill four seasons of serialized TV drama, complete with the surprising death of characters and the rise of clearly-defined heroes, villains and idolized "gods" like the Helix Fossil, all caught in a religious war. Yet it moves at a pace that can make some accounts of the multiplayer game seem outdated within hours. In fact, by the time I came back to this very paragraph, the Helix Fossil was revived and turned into the Pokemon Omanyte (affectionately called "Lord Helix" by the players). "[The channel] actually takes one of the kernels of what makes Twitch so interesting, which is turning what would otherwise be your private play into public entertainment for others," Taylor said. "What I think is great about this channel and is so fascinating is that the entertainer also becomes the crowd."
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Joystiq Weekly: Irrational Games, co-op Pokemon and a Doom beta
Welcome to Joystiq Weekly, a "too long; didn't read" of each week's biggest stories, reviews and original content. Each category's top story is introduced with a reactionary gif, because moving pictures aren't just for The Daily Prophet. Between the new Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Tony Hawk's involvement in a new game and talk of a Doom beta, this week feels like a list of lost events from the '90s. Not that we're complaining, of course - the days of platforming in mine carts, feeding arcade machines quarters and hogging family computers from siblings were pretty wonderful times. They were simpler, too - just 151 Pokemon to keep track of, with full games and expansions instead of publishers scattering in-game content to retailers and adding season passes to everything or-- Well, it didn't take us long to trip into the "back in my day" style of reminiscing. We'll excuse ourselves for a stint of warning kids passing by to stay off our lawns, but we've left you a recap of the biggest events from this week after the break. Er ... this week being in 2014, not the '90s.
Twitch Plays Pokemon: Its history, highlights and Bird Jesus
The Internet is a bizarre, confusing and sometimes wonderful place. Nowhere and no-when has that been more evident than now, as the world watches Twitch Plays Pokemon. For those not yet swept up in the madness, Twitch Plays Pokemon is the 1998 GameBoy game Pokemon Red being emulated on a computer, streamed to the masses. Those who tune in can enter the game's commands – up, down, left, right, A, B, start – in the Twitch channel chat, and said commands will be translated into in-game results. You type "up," the main character moves up. Simple, right? Not quite when you have 70,000 people typing out often-contradictory commands. The infinite monkey theorem – a mathematical principle that has existed in some form or interpretation since Aristotle – has often been taken to mean, "If an infinite number of monkeys were to use an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later you get Shakespeare." Well brother, this ain't that. This is 70,000 monkeys wrestling for control of one typewriter, while another group of monkeys interprets the words printed as holy gospel. And no, the religious imagery is not an exaggeration, as you'll soon see. Like a Rattata in Team Rocket Headquarters, we've dug our way through Twitch Plays Pokemon to bring you some of the best, the funniest, the weirdest memes and moments created by this intriguing display of unbridled creativity.
Twitch Plays Pokemon, but can Twitch beat Pokemon?
"Even when played very poorly it is difficult to not make some progress in Pokemon," the mastermind behind Twitch Plays Pokemon told Joystiq. The Twitch community is putting that opinion to the test.
Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris as reality folds in on itself
The tens of thousands of Twitch members who are participating in a crowd-sourced playthrough of Pokemon Red are also unknowingly taking part in an ongoing game of Tetris. Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris captures input requests from the Twitch Plays Pokemon chat and repurposes them for the strangest, lowest-scoring game of Tetris you've likely seen. Curated by Xkeeper, Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris features a modified version of Nintendo's 8-bit Tetris that gives players greater control over tetrimino placement...in theory. The mod adds a feature that sends falling pieces toward the top of the screen every time an "up" input is registered, adding to the chaos. It's a very deliberately paced game of Tetris, in other words. Scores are low and completed lines are rare, but possible. Other Twitch Plays Pokemon-inspired bits of madness that have cropped up over the last week include Twitch Plays QWOP and RNG Plays Pokemon, which uses a random number generator to decide input. [Image: Nintendo/Twitch]
Twitch Plays Pokemon levels up to 75k concurrent viewers, learns democracy
Last week, the chat-controlled Twitch Plays Pokemon grabbed our attention, as ten thousand people were able to simultaneously control the lead character in Pokemon Red/Blue. In the near five and a half days of the stream's existence, it's crossed 75,000 concurrent viewers, though Twitch says that the number of unique visitors to the chaotic game tallies over 300,000. Given the madness of Twitch Plays Pokemon, the stream's creator implemented a new system for the crowd-controlled game: a democratic voting system. Now, those that type commands are essentially casting their vote for the next action in the game, which goes into effect after a couple seconds. It also allows voters to add a number after their desired command to indicate how many times the action should be performed, such as "right3" being used to tell our hero to go right three times. As expected, not everyone is on board with the new voting system, so the command "start9" is gaining traction to stall the game's progress. That's why the creator also added another voting system, allowing viewers to push a meter to either "anarchy" or "democracy," presumably to decide the future format of the game. Twitch Plays Pokemon has also amassed plenty of extra attention in the form of its own observational Twitter account, Subreddit and even public Google Doc status tracker. Among the noteworthy activities on the stream since last week, the community opted to throw away two Moon Stones and its starter Pokemon Charmeleon, relied heavily on its "Bird Jesus" Pidgeot and has earned four badges in the game. [Image: Twitch Plays Pokemon]
Thousands control one Pokemon master on Twitch simultaneously
Twitch Plays Pokemon looks like an average Twitch game stream at first. In fact, it is a game in itself, as viewers are able to control the hero of Pokemon Red and Blue by inputting commands in the streaming platform's chat window. As of this writing, the stream is nearing ten thousand viewers after close to two days of play, many of which are wildly typing "a," b," "up," "down" and other instructions, sending the obedient Pokemon master into frenzied directions. We've embedded the stream after the break. As much as it sounds like players would never be able to accomplish much in this fashion, viewers were able to push on past the second gym leader of the game, Misty. Our math may be shaky at best, but we figure that with the diligence of the stream's viewers, we'll have collected all the Pokemon in a month. We shudder to think of what will happen with the beloved, singular Master Ball in the game, however.
