Twitch Plays Pokémon begins
An anonymous programmer began streaming Pokémon Red on Twitch with the game controlled by commands submitted through live chat, creating a massive shared interactive broadcast.
Historical context
Twitch had established live game viewing and chat as a growing form of entertainment, but streams generally separated broadcaster and audience into player and spectator roles. The availability of programmable chat, emulation and a highly engaged live audience made it possible to turn the audience itself into a distributed controller.
What happened
Viewers entered directional and button commands into Twitch chat, which software translated into inputs for a single running instance of Pokémon Red. What began as an experiment rapidly attracted tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers and participants and continued around the clock until the game was completed.
Consequences
Twitch Plays Pokémon became an early landmark in participatory livestream culture and demonstrated that live chat could be part of the content rather than merely commentary beside it. It inspired many interactive-stream formats and showed the cultural power of large audiences acting collectively in real time.
Related people
Sources
- Most users to input a command to play a live streamed videogameGuinness World Records
- Twitch Plays Pokémon: live gaming's latest big hitThe Guardian