In the last few days the streaming site Twitch has been hosting a live crowd-sourced playthrough of the classic Game Boy game Pokemon.

While you may be used to the classic D-Pad and A and B controls, this game is driven by the chat community using text commands instead of button bashing.

It all sounds quite simple to control, until you realise that there are hundreds of people entering commands every minute while the poor main character Red wanders around in circles and struggles to get through a visit to the Pokemon Center.  It’s the gaming equivalent of ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’ only ten times worse.

The game runs off the VisualBoyAdvance emulator and a combination of Python and JavaScript code while an IRC bot converts the text commands into button presses.

The stream has been viewed over 5 million times since it was launched last week and, somewhat incredibly, they’ve been able to earn 4 gym badges so far.

You can check out the stream of Twitch Plays Pokemon below, just hit refresh if it doesn’t load first time.

Watch live video from TwitchPlaysPokemon on www.twitch.tv

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