Pokémon Streamer Has A Comeback Story For The Ages
Shiny hunting in Pokémon games is a treasured pastime for the sickest of sickos looking for rare, alternate-colored critters. Some people get so into it that they’ll stream themselves running multiple instances of a game at once trying to track one down. Then there are those who are so dedicated they’ll try and get a starter Pokémon at the very beginning of the game in a different color, which is much more time-consuming because it requires you to reset the game and play through the opening moments over and over again. That’s why it’s incredibly painful to see someone accidentally reset their game when they managed to actually finda shiny starter.
Twitch streamer Aelfgar was innocently streaming multiple instances of the Japanese version of Pokémon Sapphire in search of a shiny Treecko. The grass-type gecko is one of the starter Pokémon from Generation III, and its shiny form is pretty sick. Its green skin is replaced with an aqua blue and its tail becomes an orange-red, and it carries that color scheme through its entire evolutionary line. You can see why someone might want those rare colors instead of the standard green. That is what Aelfgar was hoping for on July 9 as he reset his Sapphire games on stream for over two hours waiting for one to show its red tail…until he accidentally reset the game when two of them showed up.
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The pain is tangible as he is left speechless while rewatching his own clip. He decides to end the stream there, saying he’s going to go cry off-camera while playing Pokémon Black and White’s melancholy “Unwavering Emotions” song in the background.
In a follow-up tweet, Aelfgar confirmed that the two shiny Treeckos were from two different ROMs (read-only memory), rather than a mirrored stream from one video source. However, there’s some extremely technical inside baseball backend stuff that makes this outcome more likely. As people like Pokémon content creator Shiny Catherine point out, Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire have some RNG quirks determined by your save file’s in-game player ID, and since Aelfgar was using duplicated save files in different ROMs, it could be argued this viral moment was essentially him finding the same shiny Treecko twice.
Some might raise their eyebrows about the logistics, but Aelfgar’s reaction is still genuine. “Brutal” doesn’t even begin to describe it. But a Pokémon trainer’s job is never done, so he picked right back up the next day, and it only took about an hour and a half for a new shiny Treecko to show up.
What is shiny hunting if not an emotional roller coaster? It doesn’t usually happen at this scale for an audience of millions across different platforms, but at least Aelfgar didn’t have to wait long to redeem himself.
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