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(Credit: Screenshot by Nick Statt/CNET)

In a stunning display of sheer perseverance and impressive strategizing, the players participating in the endlessly strange and wondrous Twitch Plays Pokemon have, after more than 390 hours, reached the end of the game's main plot and bested the final frontier, the Elite Four. If anything, this definitively proves that if the Internet spends enough time at something, it can achieve the seemingly impossible.

Throughout the course of the first series of repeated attempts at defeating the Elite Four -- which began shortly before 11 a.m. PT on Friday and ended around 1 a.m. PT Saturday morning -- viewership on the stream doubled to around 100,000 and hovered there, only dipping down when especially ill-fated failures seemed to dampen the spirit. Though many had postulated that it might potentially take weeks to overcome the final hurdle, it in fact only less than two dozen attempts in a single day.

Thanks to what ended up being a rather fortuitous set of circumstances involving the game's final lineup of Pokemon, the team was well-suited to the challenge and only needed to grind -- or increase one's levels and thus strength through repetitious enemy battling -- into the 17th day of the stream before overcoming the challenge.

The final blow.

(Credit: Screenshot by Nick Statt/CNET)

Tracing Twitch Plays Pokemon

Having started on February 12, the massively-multiplayer Pokemon game began as a "proof of concept," says the anonymous Australian programmer who devised the genius social experiment and brought it to life on the game-streaming site Twitch.tv. The original intent was to see whether or not a group could effectively play a single-player video game by crowdsourcing the button commands. It turns out that the 1998 classic Pokemon Red for the original Game Boy was the perfect title to test such an effort.

One of many impressive pieces of fan art to come out of Twitch Plays Pokemon, Redditor whoaconstrictor's "A Most Sacred Tablet" depicts the evolution of the game's religious in hieroglyphic fashion.

(Credit: Redditor whoaconstrictor)

Through the use of an IRC chat bot set up by the channel creator, tens of thousands of players have been typing in button commands like up, down, a, and b into the Twitch stream's comment box in an effort control the main character on an emulated version of Pokemon Red. But though it started simple and small. Twitch Plays Pokemon has grown into a Internet phenomenon: Throughout the last two and a half weeks, the stream has garnered more than 35 million views with active player accounts ranging from 50,000 to peaks of nearly 120,000. Estimates put total player participation at more than 650,000 Twitch users.

Progress was slow -- and its pace and the startling suddenness of major setbacks sometimes infuriating -- but it was always astounding to see a complex task accomplished by the group in real time and the subsequent eruption of jovial celebration in the comment box.

Along the way, lives were lost -- Pokemon let out into the wild due to uncontrollable errant button presses -- and many a meme were created. Built from the ground up was a community to rival the most well-established of Web collectives with a subreddit awash in fan art, multiple Twitter accounts, a crowdsourced Google site, standalone Web sites, and WHAT.

The momentum of the community was due in part to the game's elaborately crowd-created religious narrative centered on the Helix Fossil, an in-game key item that would later manifest itself as a Pokemon that was hailed by the group as a deity. Yes, things were weird, and only got weirder as Twitch Plays Pokemon rolled on.

Furthering the game's intensely curated and mind-boggling wacky culture -- as well as the ability for the group to maneuver intricate obstacles -- was the addition of "democracy" and "anarchy" game modes seven days into the stream.

Anarchy mode retained the game's original makeup in which a free-for-all of button inputs was used to sporadically move the character around, while democracy was a true voting system that was painfully slow but careful. Switching between modes was also handed over to the crowd, with a supermajority needed to go from anarchy to democracy and a simple majority required to revert back.

Fan artwork inspired by the push-pull between democracy and anarchy began pouring into Web communities and shared via Reddit and Twitter as soon as the game modes were introduced.

(Credit: Reddit user JohnMarkParker)

The tug-of-war between the two modes was instantaneously absorbed into the narrative, oftentimes representing both a philosophical split between how the participants viewed the "true" way to play Twitch Plays Pokemon and a battle played out between the trigger-happy trolls and those who favored meaningful and speedy progress.

Yet it was only a matter of hours before a routine strategy was established: Use democracy only when it was absolutely necessary to maneuver, and then switch quickly back to anarchy for everything else. The use of the two modes in tandem towards a unified goal became one of the more mind-boggling feats accomplished by the collective hive mind.

Onwards to Mewtwo, and just maybe an all new game platform

Throughout the lifespan of the stream, Twitch has been more than supportive, revealing in a blog post last week that it loved the experiment. It's also taught the company a few things. "The incredibly high volume of chat activity has helped us to hone our chat system to deal with massive loads like we're experiencing. It has also made us all think deeply about creative social experiments that can be done on Twitch," Twitch's VP of Marketing Matthew DiPietro told Polygon.

DiPetro also thinks that Twitch Plays Pokemon may have unleashed a whole new game platform: "When you consider how game developers might capitalize on features and functionality like this, the sky is the limit," he said. There have already been copycat streams of not only other Pokemon titles, but games like Zelda, Mario, and Street Fighter. Where this goes from here, as DiPetro points out, is uncharted territory in gaming and will only prove to bolster the popularity of live game-streaming sites like Twitch.

As for the future of the one stream that started it all, beating the Elite Four doesn't mean it all ends here. Sure, surpassing those final battles marks the point where the game credits roll, but The Elite Four is just the end of the main plot line in Pokemon Red. There remains one many consider to be the high point of game: Catching Mewtwo.

That challenge will certainly prove to be the of one, if not the most, difficult goals and one possibly out of reach entirely considering the group used the one item meant to be reserved for Mewtwo, the master ball, in catching another legendary Pokemon. After all, catching that special breed -- defined primarily by having only one chance catch it -- requires precision and typically multiple retries with a handy save file, something the emulated stream has not been able to utilize. Perhaps democracy mode will take the spotlight one last time.

Wherever the stream ends up eventually, it would seem almost certain that the Internet won't be able to fulfill the oft-heard directive of our childhoods to "catch them all," especially so considering only 30 of the 150 available Pokemon have been collected thus far. But then again, as Twitch Plays Pokemon has proven time and time again, a little time, tactical problem solving, and massive collaboration goes a long way when 100,000 people put their minds together.