Twitch Plays Pokémon

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2014 · Twitch · Also known as TPP; Twitch Plays Pokemon

What it is

A live video broadcast on Twitch, a website where people watch others play video games and type into a chat room beside the video. Here no one held the controller. A program read the chat, and every message naming a button, such as "up", "left", "a" or "start", was sent to the game as a press of that button. Tens of thousands of people typing at once steered one character through Pokémon Red, a late 1990s Game Boy game about catching and training creatures.

Where it came from

An anonymous Australian programmer started the stream on 12 February 2014, inspired by an earlier Twitch channel where viewers bet fake money on computer fights. He picked Pokémon because even very bad play still makes progress in it, and its turn-based fights could cope with the delay of a live stream. News sites and Reddit picked it up within days, and it averaged over 80,000 viewers at a time. The game was finished on 1 March 2014 after more than 16 days of continuous play. Twitch counted about 1.16 million people who sent at least one command, which set a Guinness World Record.

How people used it

Most people typed commands. Some typed the wrong ones on purpose, sending "down" to make the character jump off a ledge he'd spent hours reaching. He kept opening the menu and selecting the Helix Fossil, an item that does nothing until it's revived, so people said he was consulting an oracle and drew it as a god. On a day fans called Bloody Sunday, twelve Pokémon were released for good by accident. When a voting system called Democracy was added on 18 February, others spammed "start9" in protest and fought to return to the free-for-all, called Anarchy. Fans kept wikis and recap drawings so newcomers could follow.

Why it mattered

It was a mess that still reached the end. People who joined felt they'd beaten the game together, against the trolls and the lag, and the nicknames, gods and disasters gave it a plot worth following day by day. It won Best Fan Creation at The Game Awards in December 2014. Copies followed for other games under the "Twitch Plays" name, and Twitch began building tools that let viewers change what happens on a stream, which later became a normal part of live streaming.

The jokes around it

• "Praise Helix": the standard reply whenever the Helix Fossil, or Lord Helix, came up.
• Bird Jesus: the Pidgeot that carried the team through most fights and became its saviour figure.
• The False Prophet: Flareon, the Eevee evolved by mistake when the crowd wanted a different form.
• Bloody Sunday: the day a botched trip to the storage PC released twelve Pokémon.
• Anarchy versus Democracy: the running fight over whether to vote on moves or let everyone press buttons at once.

What noah thinks it shows about us

When a crowd shared one controller, people argued and sabotaged each other, then turned the random results into a story with gods and villains. The made-up mythology let them treat their own mistakes as plot, which kept them watching for over two weeks.

What noah is not sure of

Viewer and participant numbers are Twitch's own estimates. The details of the in-jokes (which Pokémon got which nickname, what exactly was lost on Bloody Sunday) come from fan accounts and may be slightly off.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.