Gamers participating in a mass multiplayer experiment have reached the end of the game, and arrived at the Elite Four.

It took nearly 100,000 dedicated players to pull off the oddball wonder that was Twitch Plays Pokemon, but the ultimate goal was attained in the end. 

Gamers who were a part of Twitch Plays Pokemon all tried to control one character simultaneously in a round of 1996's Pokemon Red. 

An anonymous programmer first posted a live stream of the effort last Friday, which eventually ended at about 1 a.m. PST Saturday morning, according to CNET. After 17 days and at least 390 hours of continuous play, gamers emerged victorious. 

CNET reported that the team used its final lineup of Pokemon to quickly up levels and strength during constant battle.

The computer specialist who first posted the game told Polygon in an email that he started Twitch Plays Pokemon on a whim.

"I didn't really have any plans for it from the beginning," he told the gaming website. "I just wanted to put it up to see how many people would respond. I put it together and put it up on a dedicated server all within a few days."

After cooking up the idea for the social experiment, the programmer put it onto game-streaming website Twitch.tv, hoping to find out what would happen if a group of people tried playing a single-player Pokemon game by crowdsourcing the controls, CNET reported. 

Twitch commended the programmer who first came up with game, saying that it showed how much the site could do.

"The incredibly high volume of chat activity has helped us to hone our chat system to deal with massive loads like we're experiencing," Twitch's VP or Marketing Matthew DiPietro said during an interview with Polygon. "It has also made us all think deeply about creative social experiments that can be done on Twitch."