Twitch plays Pokemon Go

The internet just caught a Rattata

Time’s a flat circle. The meme-spawning shared experience that was Twitch Plays Pokemon has been reborn two and a half years later as Twitch Plays Pokemon Go. Following the success of the original stream, which had viewers in a chat room controlling the actions of the player avatar by typing in commands one at a time, Twitch “played” a lot of games, but it’s fitting that we circle back to the beginning.

The trainer started in New York’s Central Park and is still in the city, somewhere. There’s not an actual person playing the game (that is, running around New York at the behest of the internet), which uses your phone’s GPS to track location. The page explains, “We’re running Pokemon GO on a real iPhone and simulating touch events to control the screen. The location is spoofed. We capped the max movement speed to keep it as ‘realistic’ as possible.”

It’s much less fun to learn you’re not sending some poor sap into the east river.