Twitch Plays Pokémon

Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a social experiment and channel on the video game live streaming website Twitch, consisting of a crowdsourced attempt to play Game Freak's and Nintendo's Pokémon video games by parsing commands sent by users through the channel's chat room. It holds the Guinness World Record for having "the most participants on a single-player online videogame" with 1,165,140.[1]

The concept was developed by an anonymous Australian programmer and launched on 12 February 2014, starting with the game Pokémon Red. The stream became unexpectedly popular, reaching an average concurrent viewership of over 80,000 viewers (with at least 10% participating). On 1 March 2014, the game was completed after more than 16 continuous days of gameplay; Twitch estimated that over 1.16 million people participated, with peak simultaneous participation at 121,000, and with a total of 55 million views during the experiment.[2] On 5 December 2014, Twitch Plays Pokémon received a Game Award in the "Best Fan Creation" category.[3]

The experiment was met with attention by media outlets and staff members of Twitch for its interactivity, its erratic and chaotic nature, the unique challenges faced by players due to the mechanics of its system, and the community and memes developed by participants. Twitch as a company used the experiment to explore how they could make streaming more interactive for viewers and expanding their offerings. Following the completion of Red, the broadcaster continued the channel with many other games in the Pokémon series along with unofficial ROM hacks. The broadcaster has plans to continue with other Pokémon games as long as there remains interest in the channel. The success of the experiment led to a number of similar Twitch-based streams for other games, and led Twitch to promote more streams with similar interactivity with watchers.