One of the more innovative concepts in streaming history just celebrated the tenth anniversary of its initial launch. The team behind the Twitch Plays Pokémon account has booted up Pokémon Red once again for another collaborative (and chaotic) trip through the Kanto region.
Once upon a time, one million players made Twitch Plays Pokémon the hottest thing on the internet.
The year was 2014. An anonymous developer hauled in more than 15 million total views by employing Twitch chat in a then-unique social experiment.
If you’ve never seen a Twitch Plays stream before, the premise is simple yet frustratingly out of control. Stream viewers enter controller commands in the chat window, and those orders are used to control an in-game character. With only a few players, that system is not so complex, but when you have 80,000 players, as Twitch Plays Pokémon did at its peak, things get out of hand real fast.
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The format’s original run took more than 16 days to complete, and to celebrate the tenth anniversary of that phenomenon, the Twitch Plays Pokémon team is running it back. The current communal Pokémon Red session is being conducted on actual hardware, not an emulator. To amp up the nostalgia even more, Red’s hectic movements are shown on an old-school CRT monitor.
Twitch Plays Pokémon has had a lasting impact on the streaming world.
Polygon estimates that one million players took part in the viral craze back in its heyday. Twitch noticed the popularity of the stream and established an entire category for Twitch Plays content, featuring communal playthroughs of everything from Dark Souls to the claw game at the arcade.
Twitch Plays Pokémon also showed the titular platform that games with innovative chat features can forge unique connections between streamers and their fans. Even after ten years, developers are still thinking about Twitch chat integrations as part of the game design process.
A fairly recent example is Cult of the Lamb, which earned widespread acclaim when it hit the market last year. Cult of the Lamb puts in-game power in viewers’ hands by allowing them to make choices on players’ behalves. Chat has always been one of Twitch’s strongest advantages, but the Twitch Plays category took the feature to a greater level of immersion.
Even today, Twitch Plays is still a big deal.
Want proof? Head over to a different platform: YouTube. At the time of this post, one of the top ten videos on YouTube’s Trending tab is an upload from streamer DougDoug. Rather than leading his Twitch chat through some thrilling Pokémon battles, DougDoug had his followers take up arms and fight in the Revolutionary War.
The current Twitch Plays Pokémon stream will probably not need as many days to get through Pokémon Red, but there are plans to explore several decades of Pokémon games from a collaborative standpoint. The account’s producers told Polygon that they plan to visit “every mainline Pokémon region” in a “Super Gauntlet” of chaotic gaming.
