What we’re watching above – and what we believe you should all be watching at home – is Fish Play Street Fighter. It’s simple, pure, fish-on-fish combat – fantail goldfish Aquarius and black moor goldfish Robert the Bruce battle it out multiple times a day in the hope of claiming ultimate victory. They’ve even won sponsorship from professional fighting game team Always Godlike and snack food brand Slim Jim.
If you don’t get what’s going on, allow us to fill you in. A camera tracks the position of each fish within the tank, with nine different areas corresponding to nine different actions to be taken within the game (jump, punch, etc.). The video feed helpfully overlays a grid on the fish tank, so that you can determine which actions correspond to specific areas. Fights play out with infinite timers, to ensure that a victor is found. Members of the chat can even place bets on the outcomes of the matches, albeit with no real money on the line.
If you haven’t been following the weird world of Twitch retro streams, allow us to fill in the gaps. They first gained widespread popularity off the back of Twitch Plays Pokemon, a channel in which the channel’s chat room determined the actions taken in-game. From there we had variants involving Tetris and Super Mario Bros, before Fish Plays Pokemon revolutionised the genre by including marine life, leading to the competitive match-ups you see above.
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