Teach a man to fish, and he will never go hungry again. Teach a fish to play Pokémon and it will eventually commit credit card fraud. Such was the surprising lesson a Japanese man received from his pet betta fish.
A Japanese YouTuber came up with the whimsical idea of introducing his pet betta fish (Siamese fighting fish) to Nintendo Switch. Naturally, it is hard to play without opposable thumbs, but there is no obstacle that cannot be overcome by a sufficiently determined man who clearly has nothing better to do with his time.
For clarity’s sake: YouTuber “Mutekimaru Channel” did not actually teach his fish to play Pokémon. But he wanted to see how long it would take them to beat the game by making random moves.
So he set up a webcam in front of his fish bowl, while motion-tracking software monitored the fish as they swam across an overlaid grid populated with controller inputs. Whenever the fish stopped or changed direction, the software would register the fact and “click” the correlating controller input in-game.
Mutekimaru did it once already with an earlier iteration of the game. It took his bettas about 3,195 hours to beat Pokémon Sapphire. An actively playing human could do in it around 30. So it was less of a speedrun and more of a slowswim.
Mutekimaru…
