Play Pokémon on your computer, in Twitter, in someone's avatar

(Image credit: Constantin Liétard/Nintendo)

I thought Twitch Plays Pokémon showed some serious dedication to everyone's favorite games about collecting adorable seizure monsters then making them pit-fight each other for sport, but now programmer Constantin Liétard has found a way to let people to play Pokémon Red inside his Twitter avatar.

Players reply to his pinned tweet with one of the game's inputs (Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B, Start, and Select), and whichever input is tweeted the most each 15 seconds is input into an emulated version of the turn-based 1996 Game Boy JRPG. Then the next frame is displayed in the glorious 400x400 pixels of a Twitter avatar. Liétard plans to take over the controls to manually save each night so that progress isn't lost.

It's been restarted a couple of times to add new features as it becomes more popular, and now there's a Discord server allowing players to coordinate better and continue their arguments about whether Squirtle is a good choice for starter or not.

So far they've made it outside, so things are going well. You can check on their progress and join the ongoing game in this thread.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.