The most chaotic fight you’ll ever see: Street Fighter 6 invited fans to Twitch to celebrate Akuma’s return by letting them all control him, at the same time, during fights.
One of the most important ingredients to being successful on streaming platforms such as Twitch is to engage with your viewers. Publisher and developer Capcom took a page out of this book when it recently invited fans to celebrate the introduction of Akuma in Street Fighter 6.
The Capcom Twitch channel set up a stream with Akuma as the playable fighter in a series of fights, where fans decided which moves the fighter would use based on what they typed in chat. Unsurprisingly, it was complete chaos.
The event, called Twitch Plays Akuma, is not a new concept and has been used for years to play other games, starting with the older Pokémon games.
It works by allocating an input on the keyboard to a specific move. For example, if enough fans typed ‘J’ in the chat, Akuma would jump, while the basic attack moves were set to ‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘3’.
Capcom managed to gather 10,000 fans who wanted to experience button-mashing to the extreme.
The stream lasted for two hours and although it was mayhem, with fans spamming all kinds of different moves all the time, they won their fair share of fights.
It goes to show that button-mashing is still a viable technique on some level, even at this scale and with no coordination whatsoever.
It’s reminiscent of the Twitch streamer who created an Eddy bot in Tekken 8, which was scripted to just mash the kick button and yet managed to reach the game’s 12th level, Vanquisher.
You can rewatch the livestream here, if you want to see exactly what it looks like when 10,000 people play the same character, at the same time, in Street Fighter 6.
Button-mashing for the win.
