Twitter Plays Pokemon Red Creator Starts Discord Plays Pokemon Emerald
Ever since the start of the crowd-controlled Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014, Pokemon fans have devised unique and innovative ways to complete a plethora of titles from the series. One iteration even saw a fish play through the Game Boy Advance games Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, based on where it swam in its fishbowl. And earlier this year, one fan devised a new way to play through Pokemon Red.
In January, 3D programmer at Gameloft Montreal, Constantin Liétard, devised a way to let Twitter users play Pokemon Red through his avatar. Users would respond to one of Liétard's tweets with their desired button inputs for the game, and every so often, a bot would gather the most popular input and send it to the game, which would then be reflected in Liétard's avatar. However, now that Twitter has completed Pokemon Red, the programmer has devised a new way for fans to play Pokemon Emerald.
This time, Liétard has chosen Discord as the method of crowd-controlled play as fans journey through Pokemon Emerald. This new method works very similarly to Twitter plays Pokemon Red, in that votes on button inputs are accounted for every few seconds, sending the most popular input to the game. This time, however, as opposed to a still image that needed to be refreshed by Twitter users, Discord will play back the last second of the game in the form of a .gif in an automatic message.
Discord plays Pokemon Emerald is made possible through the work of a bot set up by Liétard himself. At the time of this writing, Liétard's Discord server has over 1,000 members and about 300 active users. Discord's current team consists of AKIRA the Ralts, MICRO the Tailow, Obama the Shroomish, and GEMI the Sableye, and BOO the Illumise. Anyone tuning into Twitter's playthrough of Pokemon Red earlier this year may recall that it was filled with ups and downs, including one instance where a group of trolls took over the game overnight and released almost all of Twitter's Pokemon.
It only took Twitter users about a month to complete Pokemon Red, so it should be interesting to see how Discord fares in its own efforts. So far, players have earned 3 Gym Badges, gaining their most recent one from Mauville City's Electric-type Gym Leader Wattson. Of course, this isn't an entirely blind effort though, as fans can communicate and strategize in a chat channel on the Discord server.
Last year, someone devised a way to let fans take turns controlling a game of Pokemon Sword via a livestream platform. So while many are eagerly waiting the arrival of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl later this year, it's clear that Pokemon fans have been able to keep themselves quite busy as of late.
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