Update: they've beaten Bowser - now to escape the crumbling moon!
Somehow, a hivemind of gamers has managed to amicably share a controller long enough to get Mario all the way from the Cap Kingdom to Super Mario Odyssey's final Bowser battle at the heart of the moon. If you want to follow along, check out the stream right here.
The real battle was been raging for 21 days. A group of Twitch subscribers coming together under the communitycontroller umbrella have been wrestling over a single Nintendo Switch controller, day and night, in order to finally beat Super Mario Odyssey - or, in the case of some puckish players, to ensure the game is never, ever beaten. Still, the honorable among them have managed to fend off the trolls: Twitch Plays Super Mario Odyssey is in the home stretch.
If you're just tuning in, the 'Twitch Plays' phenomenon first appeared years ago. A game of Pokémon Red was livestreamed, with control being crowdsourced by everyone participating in the chat. People would type "up," or "A," and the appropriate buttons on the simulated Gameboy would be "pressed." You can catch up with the most recent round of TPP on this stream.
The task of beating the game seemed insurmountable. Cults were formed around the worship of some impossibly lucky Pokémon; the greatest obstacles ended up being the environment (specifically, ridges), rather than fellow trainers; complicated strategies were developed, and stars - honest-to-god heroes - emerged; trolls once managed to 'release' Pokémon from the players' party. Still, the game was won; and then the next game, and the next game, and so on, with the games themselves becoming more and more complex. Finally we have arrived at Super Mario Odyssey, a completely three-dimensional game for the most recent video game console on the market right now.
So how does this gestalt organism that calls itself a 'chat' get so far in such a complex game? The answer lies in patience, mostly. Trolls were numerous, especially in the early days when the community's success made it to Reddit. "The Gold Room," for one frustrating example, was a place of nightmares - one troll and their acolytes managed to force Mario back into one room in the Sand Kingdom over and over again, usually by asking, "hey is there a moon in there?" Eventually, though, trolls get tired. The most progress the livestream made was during the nights, when only a handful of diehard gamers were online to get things done. For especially difficult moments, control was ceded to just one or two players. Then the morning would come, and chaos again.
Also helping was the eventual addition of "assist mode," which makes the game considerably easier by giving Mario a base of 6 hearts, and the ability to recover them if he sits still long enough. That doesn't mean any of the stream's success can be discounted because they're playing the game with a safety net - they even managed to pull off some speedrunning tricks, including the infamous 'Moon Skip.'
To the brave men and women of communitycontroller: TheGamer salutes you. Good luck, you beautiful fools.