Has Twitch gone too far? We’ve all seen the mass online chat used before, as thousands of gamers try and work as one to complete the likes of Pokemon, Halo, and even Dark Souls – but never would anyone have guessed it’d be used to control a sofa.
As part of a pre-Super Bowl event, Twitch partnered with pizza rolls company Totino’s for the ominous sounding “Bucking Couch Bowl.”
In this contest of champions, popular videogame streamers were tasked with sitting on a sofa-shaped mechanical bull, and then attempted to play games like Rocket League and Super Smash Bros. Naturally, people watching at home could control the sofa through Twitch to make life as hard as possible for our intrepid streamers.
As you can imagine, it’s not easy to keep your eye on four-player Nintendo themed chaos and attempt to remain firmly seated on a sofa controlled by legions of fans that are desperate to see you thrown off. Check out the video below to see Jericho’s spirited run at Smash Bros.
166,740 messages were sent to control the couch, and 34,186 Bucking Couch emotes were used, so it was clearly a pretty big hit, and further proof that if we’re handed a button that can cause pain and/or humiliation, the majority of us will whack it in an instant.
In the end, The streamer summit1g claimed the ultimate victory, and was awarded the first ever Bucking Bowl trophy – something that will no doubt become the crowning jewel of his CV.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.