We’ve been covering Twitch Plays Pokemon quite a bit on the site, mostly because I find it fascinating. There’s the social experiment aspect, the flood of creative memes, and the thrill of victory against the odds.

A few days ago, the stream managed to finally overcome the Elite Four and Champion Lance after nearly 40 attempts, slowly but surely grinding their way to victory. The next step was one of Gold/Silver/Crystal’s coolest features: traveling back to Kanto to obtain all eight of those badges as well.

The unfortunate part about the return to Kanto is that everything is pretty underleveled except for the gym leaders themselves. That makes the journey kind of like a victory tour, but even the bumbling collective couldn’t help but crush their way through after getting so strong on Lance. A Feraligatr in the level 70 range is simply too much to handle, I guess. If anything, the biggest challenge — as usual — was trying to maneuver in the right direction to get around.

Still, there was one final business matter to deal with: Red. Red sits on top of Mount Silver waiting in silence for a challenge from the new champion. G/S/E is set three years after the original Pokemon games, and apparently Red became champion and then decided to go train or meditate in the mountains out of boredom. That’s an epic fight in the first place, but Twitch Plays Pokemon gave us a twist.

Once the stream had all 16 badges, the group started to ascend Mount Silver. Waiting for them at the top was Red, as usual, who once again said only “…” and then started the battle. The difference? As rumored, Red was using his team from the first Twitch stream — Zapdos, Pidgeot, Omastar, Lapras, Venomoth and Nidoking — instead of his usual group of PIkachu, Espeon, Charizard, Venusaur, Blastoise and Snorlax.

That presented a problem for the current trainer, AJ, because his team wasn’t great against electricity (particularly two of its strongest members in Feraligatr and Pidgeot) and Zapdos was a ridiculous level 81. The first few runs ended in pretty convincing defeat. But eventually, like all of the obstacles, the collective managed to overcome it with enough tenacity. Or, if you prefer, throwing their heads into the wall until they finally broke through.

The interesting thing about the final moments of Pokemon Crystal was a change to the countdown timer. With democracy mode turned off (the way it should be for battles) permanently, a countdown clock appeared for the next game in the series, Pokemon Emerald. The catch? If the stream didn’t manage to defeat Red and complete the story before the end of the day, that was it for the journey. No more thousands of people driving the Pokemon car off a cliff. Of course, disaster was averted, and Red was crushed after a half dozen attempts with plenty of time to spare.

So Emerald is up next, starting next week. Emerald should be more of the same, especially since some of the staples (like having a Pidgey on the team) won’t be possible. Although it’s too early to say, that might be the end of the series — Pokemon Diamond and Pearl requires a more elaborate emulator and starts to introduce some touch screen capability and other issues that might prohibit this from continuing (although it’s certainly possible). It’s been an interesting process to this point, and the social experiment keeps involving in new ways. Where some thought Crystal was going to be stale, a new group of memes and characters emerged from the confusion and the lore expanded in exciting ways.