News Updated LinkMonday, 3rd March 2025 by Mike

AI plays Pokémon, spends three days wandering around Cerulean City

An AI named Claude is currently playing Pokémon Red Version live on Twitch. It’s… not going well.

Claude is a Large Language Model (LLM) in the same vein as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s LaMDA, and it’s been imbued with the ability to view game screenshots so it can try to make sense of what it’s “seeing”. Although it’s playing a modded, full-colour version of the game (to help it differentiate objects more easily), Claude’s “eyesight” isn’t great — so it’s allowed to read the game’s memory to check its team’s status, and the name of the current map.

A screenshot from the "Claude Plays Pokémon" Twitch stream. Claude is listing things it can "see" around it, including the Cerulean Gym ("building with a 'GYM' label"), "a vertical row of golden posts", and a path that it thinks "leads to something important". — Claude’s thought processes appear on the left-hand side of the screen, so you can see what it makes of its surroundings.

Claude also has a Navigation System that allows it to move to different coordinates on the screen, and a Knowledge Base to help it remember important information about its adventure.

The stream’s anonymous owner, who describes themselves as “a person who loves Claude and loves Pokémon“, claims the AI has managed to clear Lt. Surge’s Gym during previous tests — although, looking at its current run, that seems like a distant pipedream.

Claude got off to a good start and beat Brock’s Gym without too much trouble, but it had a hard time navigating Mt. Moon’s winding passages — in all fairness, so did I when I first played the game as a child. Things progressed again for a while, until Claude team-wiped on its way to Bill’s house, north of Cerulean City. Since then, it’s spent three days wandering around the city, seemingly unable to figure out how to get back on track.

And it is gripping.

I’ve been watching, on and off, for about 24 hours, and I’ve already seen it get caught in various different “loops”. Yesterday — presumably drawing on its innate knowledge as an LLM — it started to fixate on getting to the “trashed house” (the one ransacked by a Team Rocket Grunt), which isn’t actually possible before speaking to Bill. It spent hours wandering around the back yard of the NPC who tells you about different Badges, rambling to itself about secret entrances. It got stuck in the Pokémon Center for a while, trying to work out why it couldn’t reach the “woman in a red building” (actually a male NPC sitting on a red sofa).

In this screenshot, Claude is stuck inside the Bike Shop. It thinks, "Let's take a step back and think about how exits typically work in buildings in Pokémon", before listing a variety of different approaches. — Claude’s goldfish memory means it sometimes gets stuck on the most basic tasks. Like exiting buildings.

At one point, it even resorted to flipping through the game’s menus in the hope of finding a map; sadly, as it hadn’t picked up the Town Map item at the start of the game, it didn’t get very far.

Claude has spent much of today repeatedly interrogating the NPC with a disobedient Slowbro, in the hope of gleaning new information about “the Underground Passage” (today’s fixation and — again — not the thing it’s supposed to be looking for). It occasionally wanders into buildings, then struggles to find an exit, having apparently not yet realised the significance of the game’s red “doormats”.

But there’s something about seeing Claude’s “inner monologue” that makes this experiment feel endearing, rather than frustrating. It makes me root for the lil’ guy — especially when it says “Great!” or “Perfect!” like it’s just made a big breakthrough, but it’s actually something like “Great! I’ve successfully closed the dialog box, so I can move again!”

Claude wanders Cerulean City. Its "inner monologue" feed shows it deciding to enter the Gym "as it could potentially be related to the Underground Passage", then immediately exiting. — Claude *does* remember beating the Cerulean Gym, but only when it’s inside the building.

It’s also fascinating to see that, on some level, Claude knows it’s fucking up. Yesterday I saw it say, “I must be fundamentally misunderstanding something about the layout of the city.” I could almost hear it sighing. And just a few minutes ago it reeled off a list of things it’s (unsuccessfully) tried, hoping to figure out a better approach:

1. I’ve checked the western edge with the white/gray posts
2. I’ve checked the eastern edge with the gold/brown posts
3. I’ve checked the southern edge with bushes/trees
4. I’ve checked the Bike Shop
5. I’ve checked the Pokemart [sic]
6. I’ve checked the Cerulean Gym and its sign
7. I’ve checked the gap in the bushes at (16-17, 28) and found a TRAINER TIPS sign

Let me try talking to some NPCs in the city to see if they provide more specific information about the Underground Passage.

It seems I’m not the only person who’s obsessed with Claude’s Pokémon journey — it’s been a while since I’ve seen the Twitch stream drop below 1,000 concurrent viewers. If you want to join the fun, head over to ClaudePlaysPokemon on Twitch to watch its adventure unfold.

Update: After four days in Cerulean City, Claude was finally reset at 8:30pm UK time on Tuesday, 4th March. It spent its final moments speaking to its beloved Slowbro NPC, after pressing “down” several times at the city’s southern border failed to produce an entrance to the Underground Passage. Twitch chat was flooded with purple hearts as Claude v1’s game reached its untimely end.

Now let me try pressing DOWN multiple times to see if this position allows me to transition to Route 5.
The last words of Claude v1

Claude v1 is dead; long live Claude v2.