Few expected Twitch Plays Pokemon, a livestream featuring thousands of players madly collaborating together to play Nintendo’s classic role-playing game, to become more than a passing curiosity. Nonetheless, it turned into an Internet phenomenon. And it looks like Twitch user Zach Gerlock is hoping to court some of the Internet’s attention himself. His own iteration of the crowd-playing phenomenon features The Legend of Zelda, another of Nintendo’s beloved RPGs.
Similar to the software behind Twitch Plays Pokemon, Gerlock’s emulator will allow anyone on the stream to input navigational moves and also determine exactly how long each button will be held for. According to Polygon, Gerlock appropriated an existing IRC chat bot script for his emulator.
At time of writing, Twitch Plays Zelda has been viewed over 97,000 times and currently has more than 300 people frantically attempting to move Link, the protagonist of the game, to the game’s first dungeon of the game without any real success. Link spent more time bouncing uncertainty in the treeline than anything else.
The number of views and concurrent users might be a pittance compared to the torrent of players that visit Twitch Plays Pokemon, which was so popular that at one time more people were viewing it than League of Legends, the most popular online game in the world. But it’s certainly a start. Unfortunately, right now Twitch Plays Zelda is down for the count. But when it comes back, you’ll be able to follow along at the stream below:
Image via Nerdacy