Last month, Twitter embarked on a journey to play through Pokemon Red inside of a user’s avatar, not unlike the famous Twitch Plays Pokemon that came before it.

To recap, a clever programmer going by Constantin Liétard on Twitter set up his account to allow other users to play Pokemon Red from within his avatar, which updates to reflect game commands posted in the replies to a specific Tweet. Over the course of the month users made it extremely far into the game, managing to beat seven gyms as of February 8th.

However, it seems tragedy struck shortly after reaching this major milestone. Several hour ago, Constatin Lietard posted an update revealing that due to the work of trolls (which were cleverly dubbed “Team Rocket”), five out of six members of Twitter’s team had been released into the wild, and were now gone forever.

Team Rocket released most of our team, it is time so say goodbye to our fallen heroes.

AMAYBE, ABBPRI, CHAD, DHY, TPP pic.twitter.com/LScmlZkPqr

— Constantin (@screenshakes) February 12, 2021

Elaborating a bit further on the situation, Twitter user @FrankeDavi explained that the Pokemon had been released while most of the active playerbase was asleep, leaving them left with only a Level 41 Kadabra. Since then, the players have been working to replace the lost members with new Pokemon, but the event has undoubtedly set them back quite a bit.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.