back to article Hell is other people ... Thousands play same Pokemon game on TV. Mayhem ensues

What happens if you take a beloved Gameboy game from the late 1990s and wire up the controls to a 75,000-strong chatroom that anyone can enter? The answer is progress, albeit of the achingly slow form. On Monday, netizens closed in on five straight days of collaboratively playing a modified version of Pokemon Red, lobbing …

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  1. TheProf
    Stop

    In the words of Ned Flanders

    "Homer, I can honestly say that was the best episode of Impy & Chimpy I've ever seen."

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    South Park

    Why did reading this story make me think of the "They Took Ur Jobs" episode of Southpark? Must have been because both things end up with a pile of people screwing each other in the ass...

  3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
    Coat

    An Arts Council grant?

    This guy missed out on £1000's. With the right arty farty description and a claim of interactive art, engaging with the pubic, collaborative and dynamic artwork blah, blah, blah, he could have got a grant for a large screen "installation" at the Tate and a headline story on the Beeb.

    <coat please>

    No, they're not stains. They represent significant moments in my career as a struggling artist. Think of it as Tracy Emmins bed but a more mobile installation.

  4. Cheshire Cat

    Instead of simply passing all commands on as button presses, I would have coded it to look at all commands attempted within a certain heartbeat interval (eg, 0.2sec) and then pass on the most common command, resorting to random choice in the event of a tie. That would seem to be a better way to get optimal playing...

  5. veti Silver badge

    That's not a game...

    ... that's performance art.

    Kudos to the artist, but let's not pretend it's more than a one-shot. Let's see his next work now.

  6. Pet Peeve

    Some years ago, our local planetarium had this amazingly simple gadget - a button on each arm of each chair (red on left, green on right), and at certain points in the presentation, you could steer the projector by what the group wanted to do. It was surprising how well it worked.

    There was an unexplained demo before the show where the buttons would cause a dot on a projected display to blink (dots not corresponding to your seat in the auditorium, totally random as far as I could tell), and everyone spontaneously got the idea to play "figure out which dot is me". It was really fun to work out a strategy while 300 dots were blinking all over the place. I used morse code (SOS), and found my dot in under a minute.

  7. sabroni Silver badge

    Catch em all

    Surely you need to trade with Pokemon Blue to get all 151?

    1. Shrimpling

      Re: Catch em all

      And a Time machine to go back in time to get Mew from an event.

    2. ShiSh

      Re: Catch em all

      It's a modified rom, allows all 151 to be caught in game

    3. Bury the Hammer

      Re: Catch em all

      It's a modded ROM. You can even get Mew in this version.

      Current thinking is that they'll never get past the safari zone - you have to get two items in a large zone within 500 steps, and pay for each try. It's possible to run out of money at that stage in the game, leaving the game impossible to complete.

      That's if they ever get out of the team rocket hideout. They've been going round in circles in a maze for over 12 hours.

  8. Don Dumb

    Kosher?

    Nintendo is particularly touchy about licensing of their IP and the use of their games - is emulating the game and connecting up to a chatroom not going to get the coordinator in legal hot water?

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