You Can Play Pokemon Red Using Someone’s Twitter Profile Picture

A Twitter user has come up with a new and innovative way to play Pokemon Red. Earlier today, Constantin Liétard, a 3D programmer for Gameloft, announced that followers could now “play” Pokemon Red on Twitter, with his Twitter profile picture acting as a screen and commands inputted by commenting on one of his tweets. Liétard’s system operates similarly to the popular Twitch channel Twitch Plays Pokemon, with commands inputted every 15 seconds based on the most popular command chosen by commenters. Players could choose between any of the original Game Boy buttons – Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B, Start, and Select.Liétard later restarted the game to add a “save” functionality so that previous frames would be saved for posterity. To date, followers have chosen Squirtle as their Starter Pokemon, but haven’t made much progress otherwise.

Pokemon fans have found some very innovative ways to play through the Pokemon games. In addition to Twitch Plays Pokemon, in which the game follows every command made in the chat, resulting in players needing to coordinate efforts to slowly progress through the game, we’ve also seen an intrepid user play through a Pokemon game using his fish’s command. As his fish swam to different parts of the tank, a camera would send signals to a computer, which would then interpret them into various commands. As Liétard’s system uses the most popular choice, we’d expect that this system will be a bit more streamlined than a Twitch Plays Pokemon playthrough or a fish run.

As of press time, Liétard’s Pokemon Red playthrough has garned over 13,000 comments, although the game hasn’t progressed much past Pallet Town after several hours of game play. You can follow the new experiment’s progress by following Liétard on Twitter and updating his Twitter profile regularly.