Normally, parks are a great place to chill and capture lots of monsters within Pokemon GO. This particular excursion, however, ended with cops pointing guns at a Pokemon GO player instead.
Summit1g, a Twitch streamer with 86 million views, was broadcasting a Pokemon GO playthrough at a park yesterday, only to have it interrupted by one of the most annoying and dangerous pranks on the internet:
As you can see in the video above, Summit1G actually suspects that the culprit who called the cops was a viewer who told the Twitch chat to keep their eyes on the stream within the next five minutes. As if on cue, the authorities showed up shortly after that message.
According to KKTV, the police were told that a man in the park had an “AK-47 or an AR” and that he had “planted remote bombs in the park and wants to kill cops”. Fortunately, the situation didn’t escalate and Summit1G was able to explain what was actually going on, and that he was only in the park to catch Pokemon.
“I offered to give [officers] a little information about what was happening because I kind of knew, considering it happens to other streamers all the time but more in their homes. You get someone’s address and you swat them. I never thought it would happen in a park,” Lazar told KKTV.
For those wondering, everything is fine and the cops were super cool about things. Safe to say the stream is done for today though.
— summit1g (@summit1g) July 25, 2016
Summit1G actually kept streaming after his police encounter, as you can see below:
“It’s always got to be some type of dickbag on Twitch,” Summit1g said. “Literally all they’re doing is making cops waste their resources, and putting people in danger…that guy was pulling an M16 [rifle] out of his trunk… and I still got the fucking Charmander, bitch.”
Comments
7 responses to “Twitch Streamer Swatted While Playing Pokemon GO Outside”
Of course we’ll be hearing all about the culprit soon, and how they will be dealt with by Twitch, right?
Swatting is incredibly stupid and dangerous, but to say there are remotely detonated bombs when someone is waving their phone around and swiping at it is particularly dangerous because they’re a common trigger device.
Man I thought we were done with swatting after that arrest… how soon people forget.
I hope the culprit gets arrested.
The actual news piece aside, have we really come to a point as a society that we’re willing to watch someone else play Pokemon Go? It’s barely a game as it is and it encourages you to go out more than anything else, so you’re losing out on whatever minimal gameplay it offers and losing out on a major aspect of it’s design, that’s lose-lose. New low, guys.
The appeal of Twitch is experiencing something not just with the streamer but with a whole lot of other viewers at the same time. Pokemon Go isn’t a social experience for everyone. There’s clearly a market for watching someone go out and catch Pokemon and banter with a live twitch audience and the streamers have taken advantage of it. Browse some of the Pokemon Go Twitch streams to try at least understand its appeal maybe? There’s possibly some merit in not outright dismissing a growing sub-group of an industry you’re probably invested in.
People that do this stuff need to be tracked down and beaten to within an inch of their life. I don’t care if two wrongs don’t make a right I’d watch that stream.