The mathematical concept of Pi – the one you might also recognize as π rounded to 3.14 – has been playing Pokemon Sapphire since November 2021, and after all these years it still hasn’t managed to escape the starting town.
We first wrote about Pi Plays Pokemon Sapphire back in 2023, and you can get a full breakdown of the idea in that write-up. But in short, each button on the Game Boy Advance is assigned a number value from 0 through 9, and every second, one of the buttons gets pushed in accordance with the next digit of Pi. As of the most recent stream, we’ve reached a total of 83,685,085 digits.
In all that time, Pi has managed to escape the starting area of Littleroot Town a few times, but the gravitational pull of mathematics has kept bringing it back to that opening village again and again. It still hasn’t found the first gym, but it’s wandered enough in the long grass of the opening routes to do some real power-leveling with its starting Pokemon – a Sceptile that’s now reached level 88.
Pi did manage a major victory back in June, as it finally escaped Littleroot Town long enough to actually reach the first rival battle. This fight normally takes place about 20 minutes into the game. A rough estimate suggests that it took Pi over 20,000 hours to get here. It took the then-level 83 Sceptile exactly one attack to utterly destroy the level 5 Torchic on the other side, but victory only came after about 12 minutes of fumbling through the menus.
Pi might someday manage to beat Pokemon Sapphire, but at this point I’m not convinced I’ll be alive to see it. You can follow the whole saga on Twitch and YouTube in the meantime.
Check out our guide to the best Pokemon games if you need help deciding what to make your next bizarre Twitch bot play.
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