How the Pokémon cult formed.

By James Crim

The Pokémon games have always followed a simple premise. Gotta catch 'em all. That all changed when an anonymous Australian programmer decided to perform a social experiment. He wanted to see if people could work together to accomplish a goal in an environment that wasn't made to accommodate multiple people.

The programmer used the website twitch.tv which is a video game live streaming service to see if a large amount of people could play through the first Pokémon game by having everyone play the same game at the same time.This was accomplished by writing a program that would read the chat that exists on twitch.tv and having it look for commands to input into the game. The result was pure chaos.

One hundred thousand voices fight for control.

What would happen is that the character inside the game would constantly turn and spin, sort through his backpack and walk into walls. It looked as if progress was just a distant dream. But slowly by small degrees progress was made.

Sometimes progress would happen in spurts while at other times the simplest of obstacles proved to be monumental events that would take many hours to bypass.

Six hours of beating around the bush.

One such occasion involved a small bush that was in the path that needed to be cut down. It took the stream six hours before they accomplished a task that should have only taken six seconds. It was from this unpredictability that the community started to try to find some semblance of logic in such a illogical world.

The moment that started the stream on the road to becoming a religion was at a point in the early part of the game where the player has a choice of a fossil to take with them. One fossil is called the dome fossil and the other is the helix fossil. Each fossil can eventually be resurrected to become a living species of an extinct Pokémon. The stream picked the helix fossil and quickly realized that the Pokémon that the helix turns into shares similar characteristics to the H.P. Lovecraft elder god named Cthulhu.

The dark god slumbers. His whispers call out to you.

From that moment forward a narrative started to be constructed by people from all across the internet. The story then became of a child compelled by voices from a stone fossil speaking of anarchy and coming destruction if the dome fossil led him astray.

The Pokémon Pidgey became known as the prophet of Helix due to it being the strongest team member that conquered all challengers.

The rest of the grueling tale can be found in the bible The Book of Helix  which recounts the entire journey that was taken. There is triumph and much tragedy but eventually Helix prevailed and was restored to godhood and entered into the Pokémon hall of fame.

Once the game concluded the stream played throught he second Pokémon game and the story changed from religious victory to religious persecution. The gods and kings from the first game caused terrible events to happen in the second such as ethnic cleansing, child murder and anti-theism. A lot of serious and dramatic material came from the community trying to make sense of playing Pokémon with thousands of others. The stream continues even now with the goal of playing every Pokémon game in the series. May Helix be with us.