Right now, thousands of people are on Twitch right now playing one save file of Pokemon Red together at the same time. How is it possible for a single save file of Pokemon Red to be played by this many people?
Here's how this game works. The game is being run on an emulator. People are inputting a Game Boy button command in the chat on the Twitch stream. These commands can be directional inputs like up, down, left, and right. An IRC bot then translates those commands in the chat and activates them into the game. If someone comments with "up" in the chat, the IRC bot will translate it and move the character up as if pressing the up arrow on the Game Boy D-pad.
As of this post, the game has gotten to the Celadon City portion of the game, and so far, the chat isn't getting anywhere. I have no idea how long this will last. I can only assume people will leave the chat with only a few people left. The game may progress with less people. At this rate, however, this game may last for a long while.
Still, this is a very interesting concept having so many people play a single game by just putting in chat responses. What other games could be used to do this? Can it actually work for other games that aren't Pokemon? We'll just have to see what the Twitch community decides to do.
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