They say that everyone is in charge of their own destiny. What if 80,000 people were in charge of it all at the same time? That’s the question that “Twitch Plays Pokemon” asks.

A social experiment of sorts, “TPP” is a live video stream of games on twitch.tv in the “Pokemon” video game franchise. People playing “Pokemon” in a live stream is nothing new. In fact, you can usually find dozens of people streaming their play-throughs of the game online.

What makes “TPP” different is that instead of one person playing, any comment in the comment section of the stream is turned into a command for the game. If somebody types “up,” the character goes up in the game. This wouldn’t be a problem with only a few people typing commands. (Un)lucky for “TPP,” nearly 80,000 people are playing at the same time.

This leads to having to spend hours at a time trying to do simple tasks. To cut down a tree in a normal game of “Pokemon” usually takes about 2 minutes. With “TPP,” it took close to 8 hours.

The stream may seem like a futile effort. How could 80,000 people possibly beat the game like this?

Well, after nearly 17 days straight of playing the game, the stream actually managed to beat the entire game. In that time, the stream managed to set up an entire religion, a pseudo-government, and even managed to catch one of the most difficult to catch Pokemon in the game.

Many ask, “What’s the appeal?” The truth is, nobody really knows.

Thousands of people working towards a common goal is an appealing factor, but in truth, it probably boils down to it just being “cool.” Nothing like this has ever been done before, and nothing probably will be done like this ever again. Just like the stream managed to catch a Zaptos in a master ball, it also caught lightning in a bottle, which might be an even bigger feat than beating the game.