On Saturday morning at about 2 a.m. Arizona time, Twitch Plays Pokemon managed to overcome Blue’s Blastoise and beat the game!

There was no shortage of drama on the way, some of which we’ve already covered here before (like Zapdos and the Rocket Hideout debacle). But in the end, after 20+ attempts and failures against the Elite Four, the stream prevailed and Red was finally victorious. That’s right — even with tens of thousands of people controlling him all at once, Red is once again more successful than Ash Ketchum.

With 90,000+ people tuning in, a suddenly overpowered Zapdos (and thank god we managed to get him), now past the level 80 mark, crushed Blastoise with a Thundershock to seal the deal.

Here’s a couple highlights from the parts I managed to catch in the last 24 hours:

• Victory Road was surprisingly decent, especially after grinding a bit on Cinnibar Island to help with levels. With Democracy mode fully engaged (in one of the few times where I would ever support using it), the stream showed some real touch with maneuvering Red through the Strength boulder puzzles. It only took a few hours, The Ledge 3 and The Boulders be damned.
• At one point, All Terrain Venomoth (at level 36) was the last Pokemon standing against Lance and his level 62 Dragonite. Venomoth’s moves are terrible: DIsable, Poisonpowder, Leech Life, Stun Spore. We were one Hyper Beam away from oblivion. ATV managed to poison Dragonite on its first turn, but it was still over, right? WRONG. Because of a glitch in Generation I, Dragonite kept trying to use Psychic moves for a super effective hit on the half-Poison Venomoth. The problem? Those Psychic moves weren’t attacks — they were moves like Agility! So ATV slowly bled out Dragonite while he did nothing about it. Amazing.
• The only time against the Elite Four that the stream switched to Democracy was when they wanted to switch Zapdos to the lead of the party. That turned out to be important to help keep everyone alive through Lorelei, whose Ice Pokemon were also Water types (except Jynx). While results didn’t improve at first, it did prove to be the difference.

This was a cool achievement and an outstanding success as a social experiment. After about 16 and a half days, a group of complete strangers managed to overcome trolls, bots, raids, and their own confusion to beat the original Pokemon Red Version. Along the way, the collective community helped spawn a ton of new memes and created characters solely out of the strange events that happened, like Bird Jesus and Air Jordan and Digrat and the churches of Helix and Dome.

The whole thing was way more fascinating than it had any right being, and I’m glad I kept following the Reddit update thread (because watching the stream that much was impossible!) and caught a few important moments on the stream, including the win just now.

The word from the stream creator is that Gold will be next. I’m sure it’ll still be entertaining, but I find it hard to believe that anything will top the original run. Still, you never know — maybe there are some crazy stories and characters just waiting to be accidentally invented.