Imagine two kids fighting over a video game. The shoving, the elbowing, the name-calling and the ever-increasing stubbornness to have the game played one way or no way at all.

Now, multiply those two kids by 200,000 and you have one of the most bizarrely entertaining — and utterly maddening — experiences to ever take place on the Internet.

On Feb. 13, an Australian programmer launched a Nintendo Game Boy emulator that allows an online chatroom to control a single game of the iconic 1998 title Pokémon Red.

The premise was simple: a small group of people would work together to win the game by typing various commands (A, B, Left, Right, Up, Down, Start and Select). Through a little bit of collective action, the protagonist, Red, would collect badges, defeat bosses and maybe, just maybe, catch ’em all.

But within a couple of days, what started as a minor social experiment turned into an online gaming phenomenon (Guinness World Records is looking into a possible record). As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 400,000 people had participated in the chat room, the page had garnered more than 14,000,000 views and, at its peak, more than 120,000 people could give Red commands at the same time.

As you can imagine, it’s chaos. But despite repeatedly discarding various items, releasing arguably important Pokémon to the wild, taking almost six hours to cut down a single tree and spending about two days navigating a building, they are actually getting somewhere.

Though it typically takes a single player 20 to 30 hours to complete Pokemon Red, this iteration has no end in sight.

“I had no idea it was going to be this big,” the programmer, who has kept his identity a secret, told the Star via email. “I thought lowly of it because it was a proof-of-concept, so it was surprising to see such a massive positive reaction . . . It has been very exciting.”

Call that an understatement. The game has spawned numerous websites, including a sub-reddit and Twitter accounts, as well as more memes and fan art than any sane person can keep track of.

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Adding to the excitement is that the hundreds of thousands of people playing have largely divided themselves into factions: the anarchists and the democrats, named for the two ways to play the game.

The anarchists value the original form: every command counts, in a beauty-from-chaos sentiment, even though thousands of commands entered at once can hold up the game.

The democrats, on the other hand, prefer an alternative that was instituted when game progress stalled for about 24 hours on a single maze. Through democracy, players “vote” for the command they want to be carried out next. The command typed the most is the one Red obeys. Anarchists deplore the ordered system, however, arguing it undermines the original intent of the game.

Currently, players engage in an ongoing vote over which system is in play, with anarchy ruling more often than not.

A spokesperson for the website that hosts the emulator, Twitch, said Twitch Plays Pokemon (as it is commonly known) is the first-of-its-kind in terms of crowd-sourced game play.

“This is one more example of how video games have become a platform for entertainment and creativity that extends way beyond the original intent of the game creator,” Matthew DiPietro, vice president of marketing, told the Star. “By merging a video game, live video and a participatory experience, the broadcaster has created an entertainment hybrid custom made for the Twitch community. This is a wonderful proof on concept that we hope to see more of in the future.”

If you’re into Pokémon puns, you probably realize it would be Oddish for anyone to claim the game will be beat in a Rapidash. But maybe through trial, error and a little bit of Chansey, 100,000 strong can ring that Victreebel.