The crowd-playing or social experiment - Twitch Plays Pokémon - where several individuals attempted to win a game of Pokémon Red via a live-streaming site has finally ended.

After 16 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds of play, players have emerged victorious as the collaborative gaming experiment dubbed Twitch Plays Pokémon ended on Saturday, March 1, morning. The social experiment came to an end with players collaborating on inputs and strategies as a Pokémon master defeated the Elite Four and his rival to become the new champion.

According to Twitch's official blog, the total views were over 36 million and over 121,000 users participated.

Twitch Plays Pokémon began on February 12 and is the brainchild of an Australian programmer who chooses to be anonymous. He/she devised the social experiment and brought it to game streaming website Twitch.tv.

 "It was created as an experiment to test the viability of this format, the way people interact with the input system and the way they interact socially with each other," the programmer noted.

Initially, the game was intended to gauge whether a group of people could play a single-player game together by crowdsourcing the button commands. The classic title Pokémon Red for the Game Boy was seen as the perfect title for the experiment.

The anonymous creator previously revealed that the channel was launched without expectations of it gathering much attention. However, Twitch Plays Pokémon went on to become an online phenomenon and attracted several players and Internet memes as its popularity grew.

 "I didn't really have any plans for it from the beginning," the creator told Polygon previously. "I just wanted to put it up to see how people would respond. I put it together and put it up on a dedicated server all within a few days."

In mid-February the game's creator also revealed to Polygon that winning the game seemed impossible in his/her opinion.

"I'm going to let it continue to run 24/7, I'd like to see the Elite Four beaten but I have my doubts about it being possible without much better coordination."

While Twitch Plays Pokémon may be over, fans can now look forward to another adventure as revealed by the Twitch.tv page - Pokemon Crystal. The rules are the same but the game's a lot bigger so obviously it'll take longer to finish it, but who's complaining? And, it's in color! As of reporting, there were nearly 38,000 active players and a total of 40.5 million views. 

Watch live video from TwitchPlaysPokemon on www.twitch.tv