How One Stream Changed Twitch Forever

In 2014 a Twitch stream had over a million people try to complete Pokémon Red version through commands written in the chat; this is their story.

Fire and smoke vfx created by Channel Art Background

[CharlesUrban]

That poor Raticate...once an unwitting villain, but elevated to a place of prominence before meeting his end in the defense of his avian colleague. Rest easy, Digrat.

[supleted]

It just shows the old adage: "if you put a million monkeys with a million typewriters in a room with enough time, they will construct works rivaling that of Shakespeare."

[CreamyClaws]

This is one story where "and then 4chan caught wind of it..." didn't have catastrophic consequences.

[ComicPi]

"we don't know much about the streamer but we knew he was Australian"
* re-enacts a maniac eating vegemite by the spoon full *

[SendFoodz]

one of the coolest facts about twitch plays Pokemon, was that twitch woke up and thought they were under a huge ddos attack, because they had never seen such numbers before (twitch was very young back then), they ended up giving twitch plays Pokemon its own dedicated server just to handle all of bandwidth.

[DominatorK]

Finding out after all these years that Destiny caused Bloody Sunday is one of the biggest twists of my lifetime.

[Patrick_Bateman]

If I remember correctly, they tried to to do a twitch plays gold/silver or yellow immediately after and most weren't interested because they were burned out from the first twitch plays. If they had waited a few months and built up some hype for it they could have made it into a big event for each pokemon game.

[Creepy___]

the first TPP was awesome, but honestly the very best moment in TPP history was in the gen 2 version when Red had the gen 1 TPP team. Chat went crazy went Zapdos appeared

[sinistersharkfish]

Destiny: "it seems like these guys have nothing better to do than take me down" after having nothing better to do than trying to ruin twitch plays pokemon

[ShankMods]

Great video dude! I remember watching this all and following all the OC, memes, politics, and lore on the subreddit. TPP season 1 was something unique and magical on a scale that has yet to be matched.

[PlayerOnePenguin]

My favorite thing about this was while this was happening it was huge at my college and when people would talk about it they would describe Red as "We" like as in "Where are We?" and it had this aura of community.

[darkfang]

Imagine how confused Red and the NPCs must've been throughout this entire thing.

[themurc]

I love how Destiny seems shocked that after making thousands of people mad... that thousands of people were mad.

[leonarddillon]

GamerfromMars... *gasp* is talking about a video game?! After years of no gaming content, we finally got gaming content!

[WayJose]

An interesting part of the Lance battle, and one of the reasons All Terrain Venomoth was so amazing was its poison typing. Tell me if I'm wrong but due to its typing this made Lance's Dragonite spam non damaging psychic moves like agility and barrier because the games code thought it wanted use a psychic move against a poison type, essentially letting ATV get moves off without taking any damage and was the only reason a level 30ish Venomoth could beat a level 62 Dragonite. Just thought it was an important part of the story. Great video! Loved reminiscing on this.

[libbyandtai]

You completely missed what a miracle it was that ATV beat their Dragonite and how many levels he got

Also how Bird Jesus literally died so ATV could get the win
Bird Jesus died for our sins/wins

[JustinY.]

If Twitch Chat and 4chan combined their powers, no problem would be able to be unsolved.

[davidharing]

Love the names. All Terrain Venamoth, Bird Jesus, Lord Helix, Air Jordan, and The Fonz, like every bit of pop and internet culture in one nice balanced mix.

[Scresho]

"Are you the streamer?"
"Yes"
Yes, this is what I would call very good research

[scionixx]

Community: YES! We’ve made so much progress!

Dig Rat: Not on my watch.