Earlier this year, a user on the Twitch game streaming site made a figurative splash when he created a system that allowed all of the users in the stream’s chatroom to play Pokémon Red. Now, another stream has made a literal splash by rigging a system to allow a fish to play Pokémon Red.
The “Fish Plays Pokemon” stream is manned by Grayson Hopper, a fish who can make button presses by swimming around in a webcam stream split into a three-by-three grid. Each square is mapped to a specific Game Boy button, and when Grayson swims into a square that button is pressed. According to the stream’s creators, the project was created in about 24 hours for hackNY, a “hackathon” for students organized by NYU and Columbia faculty members.
So far Grayson has been playing for more than 130 hours, in which time he has chosen and named a Charmander (an interesting choice, since Grayson is most likely a Water-type) and defeated his rival’s Squirtle. Given the fish’s totally random button inputs, the length of the game, and the average lifespan of every fish I’ve ever owned, it seems unlikely that Grayson will ever make it to the end of the game.
The Twitch Plays Pokemon stream that started all of this nonsense became much more efficient after its initial burst of popularity died down, and it recently finished playing through Pokémon X after beating games from every other generation of the franchise. The stream is currently playing Pokémon Stadium 2.