It’s been 10 years since Twitch Plays Pokémon became a livestreaming phenomenon. On Monday, to celebrate the anniversary of playing Pokémon Red via Twitch chat, the channel’s producers kicked off a new playthrough of the original Game Boy game, with a twist. This time, Twitch Plays Pokémon is being played on official Nintendo hardware, not an emulator.
Pokémon Red is running on a Super Game Boy adapter hooked up to a Super NES; the original incarnation of Twitch Plays Pokémon used a variation of the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. To give the anniversary stream an extra layer of nostalgia, Twitch Plays Pokémon is being displayed on an old-school CRT television.
But the controls are still classic Twitch Plays Pokémon. Controller inputs are determined by whatever viewers type into Twitch chat. This time, the folks running Twitch Plays Pokémon are sticking with “Anarchy”-style controls, meaning, they’ll use the chronological and totally random inputs that people put into chat. The original Twitch Plays Pokémon run started out with Anarchy controls, but after days of hampered progress, switched to “Democracy” controls. That solution essentially let TPP players vote on moves to help progress the adventure.
Twitch Plays Pokémon producers say the playthrough of Pokémon Red is just the beginning for the channel’s 10-year anniversary. They intend to visit “every mainline Pokémon region” in a “Super Gauntlet” run of games and “experiment with hardware peripherals that some Pokémon games can use.”
The original incarnation of Twitch Plays Pokémon kicked off on Feb. 12, 2014. It took 16 days, seven hours, 50 minutes, and 40 seconds to complete, with more than a million people participating in the crowdsourced playthrough of Pokémon Red. The channel moved on to other games in the mainline Pokémon franchise, playing through Pokémon Crystal, Pokémon Emerald, Pokémon Platinum, Pokémon Black, Pokémon X, and others during its first year. The channel spawned a flood of imitators, including one in which a fish was tasked with beating Pokémon and Twitch Plays Dark Souls.
Head to Twitch Plays Pokémon’s channel to reminisce and lament the passage of time with your fellow Pokémon fans.
