After 16 days and over 36 million views, the wildly popular Twitch Plays Pokemon has ended with the defeat of the Elite Four.
In case you’ve been under a rock for the last few weeks, Twitch Plays Pokemon was a social experiment that was run on the live-streaming website Twitch.TV. An anonymous programmer in Australia set up a ROM of Pokemon Red for the Gameboy so that commands from the chat could be used to control the character. Hilarity ensued as tens of thousands of viewers would input commands at the same time. The stream had an average of 80 thousand viewers at any given time, and concurrent viewership peaked at over 120 thousand.
The viewers watching the stream soon began to feel a sense of camaraderie, creating countless memes and inside jokes around the event. The formed a community the way that only the internet can; Reddit, YouTube and Twitter were practically taken over by discussion of the event.
So now that it’s over, what happens next? The TPP page is currently streaming a countdown to a new adventure that will start on Sunday.
