Twitch Plays Pokemon collects all badges, enters home stretch

UPDATE 3/1/2014

Early this morning, after 16 days and seven hours of continuous play, Twitch Plays Pokemon beat the game! Congratulations to everyone who participated!

UPDATE 2/28/2014

And they did it! Twitch Plays Pokemon has officially beaten the Final Four and become a Pokemon Master...but they still need to beat their rival, BLUE.

The original story appears below.

Against seemingly impossible odds, the Twitch Plays Pokemon stream has collected all of the game's badges and is getting ready to take on the Elite Four.

If you'd like a complete recap of events, Reddit has put together an exhaustively time-stamped recap, or you can read a more narrative retelling. But this public Google document is the easiest way to see at a glance what's up in the game. According to the document, the players are working towards getting past one of the game's trickier ledge sections (tricky when you have 50,000 people playing, at least) as they head towards Victory Road.

Also notable is that the stream was able to revive the Helix fossil into the Pokemon Omanyte. The Helix Fossil is an item given to the player early in the game that cannot be thrown away; it has been elevated to a savior-like status in the chat with prayers of "Praise Helix" and "Base Helix."

Users are able to balance the game by shifting control between an Anarchy mode (where every command from the chat is input into the game) and Democracy (where the most popular commands go through). But none of the spin-off games (like QWOP and Tetris) have reached the same level of incredible popularity. The phenomenon has seen some drop-off from it's high count of over 100k viewers, currently sitting at just over 50k viewers, though it's likely the game will see another uptick as it nears its conclusion.

Are you going to tune in more frequently now that it's over? And if so, will you work to sabotage the people trying to finish the game, or are you part of the group trying to shift the game to democracy, order, and finality? Either way, Twitch Plays Pokemon has turned out to be a surprising experiment that no one could've seen coming.