Over 1 million people finish Pokemon Red after two weeks of trying

"I'm a robot playing Pokemon, I don't know what I'm doing, tell me which buttons to press."

 

Imagine controlling your game's main character through text. You type "up" and your avatar moves up. Type in "Start" and it brings up the game's start menu. This input is pretty much straightforward: certain text translate to specific commands.

 

Now imagine over a million other players aside from you using that method to control just one character throughout an entire game. Make that game the 90's Gameboy classic Pokemon Red/Blue and you get Twitch Plays Pokemon.

 

In an unprecedented move to see how united (or chaotic) the internet can get, Twitch Plays Pokemon (streamed here) allowed thousands of users around the world to collectively take on the role of Red for an adventure like no other. 

With the character at the mercy of huge influx of command input, doing simple tasks became challenging such as entering buildings and buying items as different players fight for control over poor Red.

 

After 16 days of walking towards walls, getting lost in mazes, repeatedly talking to NPCs, releasing high-level Pokemon (including its starter) to the wild, and spawning memes and fanart, the Internet finally beat the game to the joy of millions of viewers.
 

 

"In total, the army totaling 1,165,140 of You furiously entered chat commands to guide our Hero through the perilous trials of Pokémon Red and brought the world a thrilling conclusion. Nine million onlookers watched, enthralled and perplexed, as millions of “up”, “down”, “right”, “left”, “democracy” and “anarchy” orders flooded the battlefield," Twitch said on its official blog. 

 

"No giant amorphic General has ever fought so inefficiently yet so effectively.  As a result, the Event has far transcended the gameplay itself, generating life-important discussions about religion, politics, mythology, and the importance of collaboration across cultural boundaries," added the video streaming platform.

 

Twitch livestreamed the gaming experiment, while the stream's creator has remained anonymous.

 

"TwitchPlaysPokemon is stream that lets you play Pokemon with a lot of other people by typing commands into chat," read the stream information presumably written by the creator. "It was created as an experiment to test the viability of this format, the way people interact with the input system and the way they interact socially with each other."

Infinite monkeys banging typewriters
 

The social experiment is akin to the infinite monkey theorem which states that a large number of monkeys on typewriters can eventually type out any type of text. Astronomist Arthur Eddington theorized in his 1928 book that "they might write all the books in the British Museum."

 

But instead of a monkey on a typewriter, Twitch Plays Pokemon had millions of humans on keyboards and they finished one game.

 

Now that the Internet has beaten Pokemon Red/Blue, Twitch Plays Pokemon has moved from the Kanto region to Johto region as it tries to beat Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal in similar chaotic fashion.

 

But one thing's for sure: trying the Konami Code for any other game in this method will be challenging. – TJD, GMA News