People watched Twitch Plays Pokémon for a billion minutes

Back in February, thousands of Twitch users came together to watch and play a game of Pokémon by inputting game commands via the live video streaming service's chat box.

The crowd-sourced massively multiplayer online co-op version of Pokémon Red/Blue for Game Boy was an online phenomenon, drawing thousands of viewers within a day of its launch. Today at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, researcher and data scientist Alex Leavitt released numbers that revealed just how popular it was.

• At its peak, Twitch Plays Pokémon had 121,000 concurrent viewers
• At some points during Twitch Plays Pokémon, the stream was the most-viewed on the platform, and accounted for 20 percent of all viewers on Twitch
• The stream received a total of nine million unique views. By comparison, the Stanley Cup finals was viewed by six million people
• The stream received more than 36 million unique views
• The total view time on the stream was more than one billion minutes
• More than 50 million messages were sent in the stream's chat box