Obsession is simultaneously a wonderful and a terrible thing. Wonderful to behold from outside, awful to experience from within.
What kind of obsession produces an effort, not just to complete Pokemon Platinum, which after all was sold to kids with the expectation that they would be able to beat it eventually. No, what about an effort to finish every possible game of Pokemon Platinum, using a script that works on every possible random seed, of over four billion, that the game can generate? And also operates mostly on “Nuzlocke Challenge” constraints, where any defeated Pokemon (here, after the first battle) have to be released? But that’s okay, because after that first fight, the player is never defeated?
That this is possible at all is because of Pokemon Platinum’s use of a PRNG, a pseudo-random number generator. While figuring out how, mathematically, to beat over four billion possible games is a formidable challenge, it’s still better than beating every possible conceivable random sequence of events, which can’t ever be done conclusively.
So, that’s what MartSnack did. They found out how to swim through the deep-yet-discrete sea of probability to obtain just the Pokemon, and Pokemon stats, they needed to complete the game, regardless of any random event the game could throw at them, with the same sequence of button presses. It’s a journey that requires frequent synchronization, to make sure no one possible play breaks free of the others, sending that branch of fate down a rogue path. How is this possible at all, I leave it to you to discover in their Youtube video, an interesting hour and five minutes found by MeFi user (and former owner) cortex, here:
Beating Every Possible Game of Pokemon Platinum At The Same Time (Youtube, 1h5m)
