43 days after they started, the collective playing the notoriously tough Dark Souls on Twitch has finished the game.
The Twitch community felled Gwyn, the game's final boss, Saturday night. The players behind the chat-driven stream suffered 904 deaths on the way to their ultimate achievement, and chose the Dark Lord ending as their final decision. Footage from the stream was recorded and can be seen above.
Completing the game was tough, not just because of the game's high difficulty: After electing to follow the model set forth by Twitch Plays Pokemon, in which members of the chat room fought to declare democracy or anarchy to dictate how the game was played, players found themselves unable to move beyond the game's first area.
90 hours later, a switch from the real-time direction-based gameplay to a turn-based format, which paused the game to tally the chat's votes on which action to take, proved far more successful.
Twitch Plays Dark Souls saw the defeat of Ornstein and Smough, its hardest bosses, after 28 days. This fight, along with several other boss battles, has been archived so that fans can marvel at the achievement.
Playing — and finishing — Dark Souls in unusual ways has been a recent phenomenon. Fans like Benjamin "Bearzly" Gwin have shared footage of their attempts and successes at fighting their way through it using controllers like the Donkey Konga drums, voice control and other challenging gameplay methods.