Last week, the creators of boxing tycoon game Punch Club launched a clever marketing stunt that required the unwashed masses of Twitch to collectively beat the game before it could be released on Steam.

On the off chance that Twitch could not somehow keep it together long enough to complete the game in a reasonable amount of time, the game’s publisher set a hard release date of January 25, but it turned out that the Twitch community managed to organize itself much quicker than the developer could have anticipated.

Twitch managed to beat Punch Club in less than two days, four times faster than the developer ever expected.

“I was expecting it to take at least 8 days,” game producer Alex Nichiporchik wrote in a comment on Reddit. “We had tons of preliminary tests to estimate the time, but they got super organized very fast. DAMN IT TWITCH!”

Twitch Plays Punch Club: Democracy in action

The primary reason Twitch was able to complete the game so quickly was the democratic way in which the game took commands from chat. Users could vote for a command by entering it into the chat, and after a set length of time, the game would choose the action with the most votes.

This differs from many previous Twitch Plays events, where the game could be completely derailed by one or more mischievous users issuing a bad command at the wrong time. This led to many frustrating yet hilarious moments in several games, most infamously the frequent ledges encountered in Twitch Plays Pokemon.

In several of the Pokemon games, ledges are used as one way shortcuts that are usually intended to make it easy to leave an area after the player has cleared it. Twitch, however, found a more nefarious use for the ledges: making the player character jump down before an area is cleared, forcing him to retrace his steps only to be tossed down the ledge yet again.

The Twitch Plays Pokemon stream later added a voting system like the one used in Twitch Plays Punch Club, but the change was widely met with disapproval by the viewers, who said that the old anarchic style was more fun and interesting.

Eventually, Twitch Plays Pokemon compromised by activating the voting system periodically rather than using it all of the time, and users could vote for a return to anarchy mode.

Screenshot via TwitchPlaysPunchClub | Twitch.tv