The long journey is finally over. After 16 days, 7 hours and a little more than 50 minutes, “The End” shone gloriously in black-and-white upon the screens of tens of thousands of Twitch users around the world. On Saturday, March 1, Twitch beat “Pokémon Red.”
The final challenges were tackled surprisingly fast, considering the time smaller obstacles had taken previously. The team avoided a new and long-thought-impossible cliff, it tackled the longest cave in the game and finally the team’s Zapdos, nicknamed “AA-j” or “Battery Jesus,” went on to sweep several members of the Elite Four to claim victory.
Of course, the community wasn’t just going to let it end without celebration. There’s currently even a petition on whitehouse.gov for March 1 to be labeled “National Helix Day” to celebrate the Holy Helix Fossil’s triumph over the evil Dome Fossil-following Elite Hour. If the petition had nearly as many viewers as watched the stream, it would easily fulfill the requirement of 100,000 signatures.
Twitch released the hard data for viewership of the stream, a stream gaining traffic that caused chat malfunctions across the entire streaming service. The stream had more than 9 million individual viewers and more than 36 million views total, with a little more than a million actually participating in issuing more than 122 million commands. The most folks watching at a single time tallied up around 121,000 viewers.
“It’s safe to say that Twitch Plays Pokémon has been the biggest cultural phenomenon to strike Twitch all thanks to The Creator and you, our passionate and absolutely preposterous community,” Twitch’s PR Director Chase said in a blog post to the community.
And what’s next for the community? Well, Sunday morning marked the beginning of a brand new adventure. With the first generation out of the way, the creator of TwitchPlaysPokémon has moved onto the second. His choice of the three games available? “Pokémon Crystal Version.” As this is written, the stream has already collected THREE badges in that game – quickly eclipsing the pace the group was on in the last go round. It will be interesting to see how far the stream goes, since alongside defeating the eight new gyms and Elite Four, the stream will need to also defeat the eight gyms from “Pokémon Red” all over again – including all the little obstacles that caused big problems in between.
But the possible final goal? After all 16 badges are collected, whoever still has patience with the stream will be able to fight the ultimate trainer on top of Mount Silver: Red, the player character from the game they just defeated. There’s even a possibility the creator of the stream has hacked the game to change Red’s team to that which defeated in the Elite Four in this stream. Only time will tell. Just as before, you can watch it all unfold right here.
