Twitch Plays Pokémon: Not Done Yet!!

Twitch Plays Pokémon recently finished playing Pokémon X – the most recently released game in the Pokémon franchise. With viewers that hardly got above a thousand completing the game, there was a small surge of viewership as people came to see what would happen now that the last game had been played. What they were met with was the text displaying the promise of game play for Pokémon Omega Ruby in about 100 days and for Pokémon Red to begin a handful of days after that. Personally, I believe that they should go with Pokémon Blue to mix things up but that’s just me.

If you haven’t heard, the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon is a Twitch.tv stream channel that shows the process of a Pokémon emulator that is rigged to accept button commands from the channels Twich’s chat window. Effectively, this means that anyone watching was in fact playing the game and had a (rather small) amount of control. What started out as a small experiment, exploded into a massive sensation.

This Is AWESOME!

The chat controls the emulator of the game up through Pokémon Black 2 (with the more newer games featuring a considerable slow down due to how difficult it is to extract ROMs of modern games). Since no functional ROM for Pokémon X had been generated, the game was played on the 3DS – a heavily modified 3DS for that matter. A very impressive feat! Each game takes roughly 2 weeks to complete and there have been some intermission with other games between Pokémon titles.

Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, enhanced remakes of Ruby and Sapphire from Pokémon’s 3^rd generation on the GameBoy Advance, will hit stores November 21, 2014, more than 10 years since their original release. In the mean time, Twitch Plays Pokémon seems like it will be continuing to stream random CPU battles from Pokémon Stadium 2 where views can “Bet” on which team will win.

While I’m sure many people have lost interest in watching and participating in TPP, it’s interesting to see that the journey has not ended. How long will this channel last? Who knows? It’s been over 5 months in the making and I’m sure it will make it to its anniversary.