Now you can play Pokémon Red through a Twitter avatar
UPDATE: Twitter beats Misty.
UPDATE 18/1/21: Astonishingly, players are continuing to control a copy of Pokémon Red through someone's Twitter avatar and, one week on, Twitter has somehow beaten Water gym leader Misty.
The Cerulean City star was bested yesterday afternoon thanks to the work of numerous Twitter users and an Oddish nicknamed Curse.
Other developments include the game's starter Pokémon Squirtle being evolved into a Wartortle and the capture of a Geodude which has been nicknamed Abbpri. That'll prove useful against Electric gym leader Lt. Surge, who's up next.
How are people doing this? We covered all of that in our original story, below.
ORIGINAL STORY 11/1/21: Why play Pokémon Red on a Game Boy? Boring! Now you can play along using someone's Twitter avatar.
Following in the footsteps of the popular Twitch Plays Pokémon, this crowd-controlled version of Pokémon Red asks for your inputs to affect the game.
Comment on the below tweet with a Game Boy button input (Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B, Start, Select) and the most popular result every 15 seconds will be chosen. The game will then upload a screenshot to Twitter, as the account's 400x400 avatar picture.
The idea is the work of Constantin Liétard, a programmer at Gameloft Montreal, who launched the project over the weekend.
More than 30k comments have been made to control the game so far, and a Discord community has sprung up to try and guide the game to victory.
At the time of writing, Twitter Plays Pokémon is currently in the middle of an encounter with a wild Bellsprout. The player's Wartortle, which is now level 18 and has been nicknamed "AMAYBE", is low on health. (And now I'm watching as Twitter opens the player's item menu and applies a potion. Good work!)
We'll keep you posted as the account progresses.
