Now you can play Pokémon Red through a Twitter avatar

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 400×400 avatar picture.

You can now play Pokemon Red in my avatar! ?

Comment one of those buttons on this tweet:
Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B, Start, Select pic.twitter.com/9RV383BGjW

— Constantin Liétard (@screenshakes) January 8, 2021

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings

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.