The Evolution of Twitch Plays Pokémon: A Decade of Chaotic Collaborative Streaming
Twitch Plays Pokémon, the revolutionary concept that captured the internet’s attention, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. The team behind Twitch Plays Pokémon has once again launched Pokémon Red, embarking on another shared and chaotic journey through the Kanto region.
Once upon a time, millions of players made Twitch Plays Pokémon one of the hottest topics on the internet.
In 2014, an anonymous programmer garnered over 15 million views by utilizing the Twitch chat for a unique social experiment.
If you’ve never watched a Twitch Plays stream before, the premise is simple yet frustratingly uncontrolled. Stream participants enter controller commands in the chat window, and these commands are used to control the character in the game. When there are only a few players, the system is manageable, but when the number of participants reaches 80,000, as was the case with Twitch Plays Pokémon, chaos ensues in an instant.
The initial run of this format lasted over 16 days, and to commemorate the tenth anniversary of this phenomenon, the Twitch Plays Pokémon team decided to reenact the event. The current co-op session of Pokémon Red is being played on real hardware, rather than an emulator. To amplify the nostalgic atmosphere even more, viewers can see Red’s adventures on an old cathode ray tube console.
Twitch Plays Pokémon has had a lasting impact on the world of streaming.
Polygon estimates that at its peak, the viral frenzy involved millions of players. Twitch noticed the stream’s popularity and created an entire category for Twitch Plays content, offering collaborative playthroughs of games ranging from Dark Souls to tabletop games.
Twitch Plays Pokémon also demonstrated to the platform itself that games with innovative chat features can create unique connections between streamers and their fans. Even after ten years, game developers are still considering integrating Twitch chat into the game design process.
One of the latest examples is Cult of the Lamb, which gained widespread recognition after its debut last year. Cult of the Lamb empowers viewers by allowing them to make decisions on behalf of the players. Chat has always been one of Twitch’s greatest assets, but the Twitch Plays category took this feature to a whole new level of immersion.
Even to this day, Twitch Plays remains a significant phenomenon.
Need proof? Head over to another platform: YouTube. At the time of writing this article, one of the top ten trending videos on YouTube is a streamer named DougDoug’s War of the Revolution. Instead of conducting his wild Pokémon battles in the Twitch chat, DougDoug asked his viewers to participate in an interactive Revolutionary War game.
The current Twitch Plays Pokémon stream probably won’t last as long as the previous Pokémon Red marathon, but there are plans to explore several years of Pokémon games through the lens of collaboration. The account’s creators have mentioned intentions to visit “every main series Pokémon region” in a “Super Gauntlet” filled with chaotic gameplay.
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The source of the article is from the blog regiozottegem.be