Pokémon Omicron

> *"It's time to move on from Omicron."*
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The title screen of Pokémon Omicron

**Pokémon Zeta & Omicron** are a pair of Pokémon fangames made in RPG maker by reddit users 'thesuzerain' (known for Pokémon Insurgence) and 'Sir\_Willis\_CMS' first released in 2013, with their final update released in 2014. A large community was built around the games at the time of release, though all development effort has since shifted over to the Insurgence project.

As a stream game, Pokémon Omicron is remembered as one of Mark's longest stream series, spanning over a large period of growth for the channel. As such, most of the people who were around for the beginning of the game are now considered some of Mark's longest and closest fans, and the game is moreso a point of nostalgia for them than it is a lasting icon for Mark's stream identity.

## Stream History

On September 23rd, 2018, one day after the landmark stream that was the first Tetris Plus race, Mark started his first stream of the Pokémon Omicron version because "someone suggested it to me in my chat a while ago".

Enjoying himself, Mark continued to stream Pokémon Omicron, relishing in the game's fresh feeling, and would end up playing the game for four streams in a row, until the start of October when he would start mixing in Super Mario World romhacks. He continued to stream the game throughout the month, noticing a ramp up in difficulty slowly, and by the end of October, he had finally reached the Elite Four. On November 4th, he had beaten the Elite Four and the following bosses and had beaten the first stretch of the game.

Omicron's 'postgame' began shortly afterwards, but the jump in difficulty for this stretch of the game began to take a noticeable toll on Mark's enjoyment of the game. Having already seemingly overcome the game, needing to grind in order to beat more challenges was noticeably becoming a bit of a struggle. On November 6th, Mark would attempt to beat the first 'Sigil Hall', a challenge similar to a Pokémon Gym with added difficulty. Despite his attempts, he would not beat the boss and would try again on the 11th.

The difficulties Mark would have with this game would cause him to set aside the game briefly. On November 18th, he would pick up *Pokémon Let's Go Eevee*. Upon starting this game as a recurring series, the urge to return to Omicron would dwindle, and Mark used the freedom to break away from the game he'd spent over a month and a half streaming and pursue other projects.

In late November, Mark moved out of his house at the time and streams became sparse, eventually culminating in a hiatus about a week and a half long from November 26th to December 6th. After completing Let's Go Eevee, Mark would pivot to streaming *Super Smash Bros. Ultimate* upon its release on December 7th, with many following streams inviting viewers to play with him. In January, Mark took an interest in the trend of streaming Zelda randomizers, decideding to play *The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Randomizer* and *The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Randomizer*. It was around this time that he also streamed *The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess* with Linneus. In February, Mark started *Donkey Kong 64*, and in March, Mark would host a community tournament for Smash Ultimate.

During this time, Mark had received occasional requests and questions about his return to Pokémon Omicron. On March 4th, a joint stream combining a look at the "Backer Preview" demo for the game *Indivisible* and the return to Pokémon Omicron was announced.

With the playthrough restarted, Mark would stream the game again the next week, but it was during this stream that he encountered a huge issue. During a postgame event, the player encounters the legendary Jirachi, but this area acts as a checkpoint and can keep the player here even if they black out. Mark saved in this area and during this event, was unable to leave due to a glitch. He ended stream on an unsure note, as it seemed like the game and the save file that months were poured into might be lost.

Later that night, however, with RemindMeToCheck's help, upon looking through backup saves, one of the four saves was found to be salvageable, and the game could be rolled back to continue the playthrough. Over the next month, Mark neared the end of this postgame segment, defeating the last of the Sigil Halls and making it to "Timelock Temple", In early April, he would end up defeating Red and the villain Zeus right after, marking another stretch of the game completed.

Despite completing yet another segment over the course of a few months, there was still more to the game. Seemingly a lot more. Motivation to continue the game was beginning to wane, and the next segment of the game would put Mark in a new region with all new Pokémon, along with forcing him to start a new team entirely. Battles here would begin to drag and the drive to beat challenges cleverly and strategically fell to the wayside.

On April 22nd, Mark would stream Pokémon Omicron again before drifting away again. Mark had long considered streaming another fangame (the "Pokémon Blazed Glazed" romhack) upon completing Omicron, but he had put it off for so long. Conflicted on his desire to meet the expectations of his fans and his complete lack of desire to play the game any longer, it would be about a month before, on May 19th, Mark announced the beginning of a Pokémon Blazed Glazed series, effectively ending the Omicron series he had started eight months prior.

## Criticisms

Mark's enjoyment with Pokémon Omicron fell off drastically over the eight months he spent streaming it, and there were a number of notable criticisms he had with the game that led to its eventual quiet cancellation.

* **Presentation** - The game suffered from a number of visual and audio issues, likely owing to the various (and clashing) sources from which sprites and music were taken. Pokémon and character sprites were taken from Generation III, IV, and V games, with characters all being edits of sprites from previous games. Varying resolution led to very noticeable differences in quality, and a familiarity with the edited sprites would break immersion very easily. All the strangely resized sprites were especially awkward when put alongside the game's original designs, which were often disturbing and strange, none more notable than the legendary "Divaevus", which garnered a horrified reaction from Mark.

Music especially contributed to wearing down Mark, as no tracks in the game had proper seamless looping. Once any music track ended, there would be a noticeable stop, followed by a moment of silence, and then the track would start again, complete with its intro. On top of the fact that much of it sounded very out of place when compared to the reused main series Pokémon OST, the soundtrack became very grating, especially in indoors areas which used an extremely short loop, and thus would cut off and back on every few seconds. Within a few streams, Mark had decided to mute the game entirely, and would play his own personal stream playlist during gameplay.

* **Clarity** - Figuring out where to go and what to do was never too great an issue, but figuring out some of the game's mechanics, especially in the case of secret bases and special new moves, was often an ordeal that ate up a lot of stream time, and viewers such as whitesamurott and RemindMeToCheck spent a lot of time pouring over Zeta & Omicron's wiki to try and guide Mark.
* **Difficulty** - Rampant jumps in difficulty did not mesh well with Mark's playstyle of frequently changing out his team rather than building for one consistent strategy throughout the game (see Viewer Pokémon). The game jumped up in levels constantly and, with a raised level cap, continued to do so well past Level 100. Along with the strange original Pokémon having very high stats, boss fights led to a lot of losses and came with a large penalty to money.

The game's resources for making fights easier, such as items and even special trainer refights to grind experience, cost a lot of money, and so often the only option was to just try the fight again, hoping to gain a little more experience, and the slow trickle of progress as Mark constantly threw himself against bosses took a long time. The game had methods to grind money, but that would ALSO take a long time, and often the preparation for fights would take so much time that a stream would have the same amount of progress as those streams in which Mark simply took on the challenges with no preparation over and over.

* **Monotony** - Lastly, all previous issues added up in their own right, but no issue was quite as impactful as the simple fact that the game just dragged on for too long. Beating the initial gyms and Elite Four was a fun romp despite the difficulty, and the Sigil Halls portion of the game, while a little tedious, was worth the curiosity. However, the ensuing boss gauntlets coupled with the promise of yet *another* long stretch of game, this time almost completely setting Mark back to square one, amplified every other issue, and tedium greatly outweighed interest in the game for a long time.

## Viewer Pokémon

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Mark's Omicron series, the entirety of his active team was always based on viewers and their requests to be represented in-game by a species of their choosing.

From the beginning, Mark had taken suggestions for nicknaming Pokémon. His starter Horsea was named "King Drown" at the request of Linneus, but shortly into the game, viewer furryfury11 suggested that Mark nickname his Pokémon after viewers.

Having a small viewerbase at the time with a few friends, Mark reluctantly obliged to furry's request, and gave his chat the opportunity to pick Pokémon that would be added to his team. Initial picks included whitesamurott's Meowstic♀ (named "Samurott"), psychoDon525's Golurk (just named "Don"), and Linneus' Clefable (named "Linda"). Over time, Mark's viewerbase grew, and he had received many requests for Pokémon. By the end of the streams, with frequent requests, he had caught and evolved over 65 Pokémon, many of which he attempted to use on his teams and would cycle out frequently.

Mark, in fact, almost entirely refused to use non-viewer Pokémon, which led to complications when the game's first water routes cropped up. No viewer Pokémon at the time were able to learn Surf, even though Mark had caught multiple water-types of his own volition (in addition to his starter being able to use the move). What followed was viewers Linneus and whitesamurott devising a plan to get Mark to take one of his existing water-types and then name it after a viewer so that there would be an excuse to progress with little effort.

whitesamurott's first plan was to create an alternate account named "king\_drown" and then come to chat, asking to be a Horsea, giving Mark a *no* effort solution to the problem. Seeing through the joke, however, sights were instead set on an unnamed Corsola, and every new viewer who entered the chat was almost immediately asked by Linneus and whitesamurott if they would like to be a Corsola.

Mark vehemently opposed this plan and whitesamurott would often take to asking Howdy\_Do\_Bot for approval in attempts to garner sympathy for Corsola. She, however, would almost always deny these requests. Eventually, however, fellow streamer VestingBarbecue would agree to be Corsola, putting an end to the active Corsola antics (though the jokes would persist for long afterwards). Corsola was named "Vestinh" in his honor.

A similar trick related to whitesamurott's king\_drown account was to make new alternate accounts named after Pokémon Mark already had to confuse him. Notably, an account named "ground\_typ" after a Sandile Mark had already caught came into chat, asking if they could be a Sandile. Mark, deciding "sure, I already have one of those", went to his PC to fetch it. Upon seeing that it was already named "ground\_typ", exclaimed "We already named this after you!" However, viewers who were certain they had never seen this person before quickly noticed that the user in chat had only just made their account that day, and Mark's bewilderment eventually led to him realizing what had just happened.

These viewer Pokémon provided much of the motivation to progress the game, and by the end of the series, Mark played almost solely so that he could catch all of the viewer requests on his list, and did not revisit the game once he had done so.

## Lasting Impact

Despite Omicron's memorable nature as a stream series, little to no lasting aspects of Mark's stream identity would come of it. No emotes or stream elements would ever be created based on the series, and even Mark's own Pokémon representative (an original creation of the game known as Ausitto) would not go on to leave a lasting impression.

However, even with that in mind, other viewers would go on to create works such as an Austin (Lead\_Crow) remix, "I Was Gunna Brickbreak Your Head (But I'm Pissed) (Markass Remix)", and whitesamurott would go on to play "Corsola challenge runs", attempting to beat each of the main series Pokémon games with only a Corsola, having gained a bit of an attachment to the Pokémon in her attempts to vouch for it.

The most notable lasting impact was likely for another streamer, Linneus. He was already in the habit of drawing art at the end of each of his streams based on something that happened during the stream, but during an art stream in which he'd drawn a picture based on an old design for a sexy Clefable he'd conceived of many years ago, he decided to draw stream art for that stream as well, and took inspiration from Mark's Pokémon Omicron series (which had just gotten past the Elite Four at that time) in which he had chosen to be a Clefable named Linda (partly *because* of this old design giving him an affinity for the Pokémon) along with Lead\_Crow's remix (which featured the line "Linda is a fire type" prominently).

Linda would later go on to become a stream mascot for him, appearing in multiple emotes and his server icon.

Following this, Linneus decided to draw *all* of the viewer Pokémon at the end of each of his streams, hoping to incorporate a little of their personality when possible, starting with Bemusicality's Sunkern. Even though he would do one at the end of every stream, the growing list would take him almost seven months to complete (starting with Linda on November 4th, 2018 and culminating in King Drown and ground\_typ on May 24th, 2019). All art was done by Linneus solely on his streams, though for one drawing in this series, Mark would do guest art (for "Dawnald" the Butterfree, named for streamer Dawnfinder).

### Lucario Doug

> *Full Article: Dougcario*
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Linneus' Omicron art series would also be a memorable series for *his* viewers. A notable instance occurred during the artwork for viewer "CallMePaws". After both Mark and Linn had had very tiring streams, Mark lamented over the amount of effort it took to get a Lucario for this viewer, and the two made jokes during the art segment. Linn noted that the shape needed to initially sketch Lucario's face was very uncanny (given the rounded snout), and the two agreed that it was reminiscent of the character Doug Funnie, from TV show *Doug*. Linn quickly popped up an image of Doug from Google Images, erased all of Doug's facial features except for the nose and mouth, and drew a Lucario face on top.

The image would become a bit of an in-joke, with multiple references to Doug faces being scattered across future art segments. With the series as memorable as it was, Linn would make a command for his own bot, Wonderful\_Bot\_L\_Star, !omicron, so that viewers could acquire the link to the completed album at any time.

> Said completed album of Linneus' Pokémon Omicron art series can be found here.
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## Trivia

* Pokémon Omicron is largely credited with the proliferation of the quote command in Mark's chat. From April to September of 2018, only 35 quotes were added prior to the first Omicron stream. Six quotes were added during that stream and by October, the number had jumped to 70. By the time Omicron had reached its first hiatus on November 11th, there were 295 quotes. By the end of the series on April 22nd, there were 697 quotes, 199 of them (28.55%) coming from Pokémon Omicron streams. For comparison, at the time of this writing, there are currently 89 quotes from Super Mario World romhacks, 63 quotes from Donkey Kong 64, 51 quotes from Super Mario Maker 2, and 49 quotes from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
	+ *Quote 594: If you guys quoted everything I said, then it would just be a Pokémon Omicron stream! [Donkey Kong 64] [03/11/2019]*
* whitesamurott would go on to successfully beat multiple Pokémon games using only a Corsola. She will still bring up the Pokémon from time to time.
* Typing "lucario" in Linneus' stream chat still brings up a link to the LucarioDoug image.
* Mark has since placed a ban on all viewer-requested collections for his stream series as his viewerbase is simply too large now to reasonably cover everyone. Occasionally he will acquiesce for one of his longtime fans.
* Upon completing the art for Dawnald the Butterfree, Mark placed the image as his stream sidebar for his next stream in the same way Linneus would with each of the Omicron drawings.
* While Mark drew Dawnald, Linn would draw his own fake Butterfree image with Doug's face to post alongside Mark in their servers as an in-joke. "Doug" the Butterfree is still displayed in the Omicron album alongside the others.
* Although Mark would uphold that viewer Pokémon were free to request, he would still receive donations for them on at least three occasions. Most notably, Mark did not want to give any viewers Lucario, deeming it special and knowing that he would get many requests for it. However, CallMePaws would donate to Mark and get one named after him, thus leading to the eventual Doug/Lucario joke in Linneus' streams.
* Howdy\_Do\_Bot was also given a Pokémon by means of process of elimination using her !question function. A number of questions were fielded to her (Should it be from Generation IV? Should it be Generation V? Do you want a Fire-type?), narrowing the pool of available Pokémon, until she had agreed to the question "Do you want to be a Darmanitan?"