Twitch Plays Pokemon Starts A New Adventure But How Long Will It Take To Beat 'Pokemon Crystal'?

It took just over 16 days for Twitch Plays Pokemon to beat "Pokemon Red" and thousands of users are back to complete "Pokemon Crystal." With the next social experiment underway, it will be interesting to see how long it will take thousands of users to beat the game and if the phenomenon can reach the same level of success as the first time.

Twitch Plays Pokemon was launched on Feb. 12 and let thousands of users control the main character of "Pokemon Red" through a modified emulated version of the game. The success of that experiment led to memes, plenty of media coverage, millions of views and at its peak had 120,000 users playing at the same time. According to Polygon, "Pokemon Crystal" is an updated version of "Pokemon Gold" and "Pokemon Silver," with new features as well as the inclusion of a Battle Tower, that was released in 2001 on the Game Boy Color.

With "Pokemon Crystal" the curosity and uniqueness that led to the success of Twitch Plays Pokemon is no longer there. Thousands of users were eagerly anticipating the new challenge and the game modes installed during "Pokemon Red," "Anarchy" mode, which applies user inputs automatically, and "Democracy" mode, based on the most popular user inputs over a 30 second voting period, should allow for more organization. Then again, knowing the Internet, there could be a push to force "Anarchy" and make the game a chaotic experience that sees the main character, AJDNNW also known as Andrew or A.J.

It will be interesting to see if Twitch Plays Pokemon can complete "Crystal" faster than the 16 days, seven hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds it took to beat "Red." Another aspect to consider will be the popularity of the social experiment. "Pokemon Crystal" started at 7 a.m. EST on March 2 and it seems like there has been no decrease in popularity as the number of users has hovered around 80,000 but there is a question if that number will trickle off over the next two weeks. The popularity led to plenty of memes surrounding Lord Helix and Bird Jesus and it is hard to duplicate that type of response.

For those that want to keep track of Twitch Plays Pokemon's progress there is a play-by-play thread on Reddit as well as a dedicated subReddit.