Twitch Plays Pokémon - The First Adventure Afterthoughts

Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a social experiment/livestream in which the audience participate by entering commands into the chat. I use the term 'social experiment' loosely, considering it's mostly just 90,000 fellow nerds furiously typing commands at the same time as each other, debating the course of action and creating a hugely enjoyable community.  The stream's host is running a script that picks up commands from the chat and inputs them into the game (a ROM of Pokémon Red), allowing the audience to control Red, the game's protagonist. Brilliant in theory, hectic in reality and fun regardless of this.

It can't be denied that TPP is great fun to follow. From the early moments of our adventure as we trained ABBY the Charmander, the rise of 'Bird Jesus' the Pidgeot, the evolution and eventual release of 'The False Prophet' Flareon, the slow progression from gym to gym, to the final moments when AA-Jay the Zapdos landed that killing blow on Blastoise. And of course, who could forget about the omniscient, omnipotent Lord Helix and our entire day spent stuck in the Team Rocket hideout?

As people who were there in the first adventure's final moments say, "You always remember where you were when Blastoise fell". The finale was truly epic; many members of the 80,000+ audience admitted to crying tears of joy at the game's completion. Me, being the cold hearted Onix that I am, even let out a tear or two. I couldn't help it, we'd come so far and I'd grown so attached to our team. To see us win that final match and land that killing blow after 16 days felt like we'd accomplished something far greater.

As I type we're almost a day into Adventure 2. This time it's the world of Pokémon Crystal, with our custom-named trainer 'AJDNNW', or AJ for short. Will this adventure be as epic as our first, or will it suffer from the classic "Never-As-Good-As-The-First-Time" trope? (that was a mouthful!). Join the rest of us and find out! You can check out the last adventure's team and progress in this Bulbapedia page, alongside information on our current progress. Hope to see you guys in the stream!

Honourable mention to 'AATTVVV', (All-Terrain Venomoth) for being the ultimate Dragon Slayer AND coincidentally my favourite member of Red's team. YOU'S MY HOMIE ATV!