Summary
- April Fools gags range from dumb to annoying, but some ideas are actually worth pursuing.
- Developers often put creative energy into joke announcements that fans actually desire.
- Some April Fools gags became real features due to positive reception and serve as inspiration for game development.
Today is April Fools’ day, and that means you’ve probably seen a bunch of gaming-related April Fools’ announcements that range from just dumb to very annoying. The same thing happens every year, sadly.
What’s even worse, is that sometimes game developers or publishers announce something for April Fools’ that’s actually an excellent idea. It can be content for an existing game, or a fake game announcement for something everyone actually wants to play. To me that’s not funny. Instead, it’s just a sign that we could be getting the good stuff, but for some reason they won’t give it to us.
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April 1st Is a Terrible Time to Be a Gamer
To be honest, I don’t think there’s anyone who really likes it when we’re flooded with April Fools’ gags every year, whether in gaming or not. It’s hard enough to tell real news from the fake variety the other 364 days of the year, so spreading misinformation on purpose means that I’d rather just stay offline until April 2nd.
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It’s one thing to have April Fools’ announcements of things that are funny, but that no one would actually want. It’s another when developers have blown their creative energy to come up with something really awesome that they have no intention of ever making.
So Many April Fools’ Game Ideas Are Genuinely Awesome
Some ideas are so goofy, they might just work. Take Sten Pinball’s 2022 April Fool’s announcement of a pinball table based on the sitcom Frasier.
Who wouldn’t want that? It’s exactly this sense of fun that’s missing from so much of gaming these days, and we only really get to see it this one day of the year.
Take the Terratron, which was a joke announcement for Starcraft II. Why not do it? Giving each faction a Voltron-esque superweapon that needs to be assembled from sub-vehicles is an awesome idea. It could have been its own game mode, and in the case of the Terran faction in particular, it even fits their culture and tech tree.
Sometimes the April Fools’ joke isn’t just a quickly-photoshopped image in a tweet. Instead, we get jokey game modes that you can actually play, but only on April Fools’, so even if you were having fun and getting to grips with a new game mode that actually took some time and effort to make, it’s not going to last.
Then, developers spend time and money making fake trailers for games that would probably sell a million copies in the first week, like this trailer for a crossover between Animal Crossing and Fantasy Life. Are you kidding me?
It Shows What Happens When Creatives Are Given Freedom
In an industry that’s less willing to take chances because their budgets are too big, there’s little incentive to go out on a limb and do things that are aimed at fun. Instead, we get an endless parade of sequels with the same generic style of gameplay, and more monetization “features” crammed into them.
The indie and double-A budget game segments are doing a decent job of bringing in fresh ideas instead of more polish and less gameplay, but when it’s obvious that something like a battle royale mode for Halo Infinite could have been a major success, it sucks that big developers are too risk-averse to see it through.
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Sometimes, April Fools’ Gags Become Real Features
Sometimes a prank gets a reception that might even surprise the developers, and so they have to make it real. Maybe the most infamous example is the Pandaran announcement.in 2002, which were described as panda people for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Too goofy for Warcraft? Well ten years later the Pandarans were officially introduced to World of Warcraft in the Mists of Pandaria expansion.
Though not April Fools’ specifically, the secret cow level in Diablo II started as a hoax, and that was an awesome fun addition to the game the modern Blizzard doesn’t have the self-awareness to do.
The 2019 April Fools’ prank showing off a Yakuza game with turn-based combat turned some heads. Well, it turns out that this was no joke at all, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon was a real game. Although it wasn’t the reception to the joke that made the game real, it might as well have been market research.
In 2014, we got a joke about finding and catching Pokémon in Google Maps. Two years later we got Pokémon Go!
There was also the World of Tanks April Fools announcement of a moon map, where you could fight with your tanks in the low gravity of the lunar surface. A cool and creative idea which became a reality two years later.
Though it is more than a little annoying when we get April Fools’ announcement of things that would actually be cool if they were real, it’s nice to know that sometimes. if we complain about it hard enough, some developers will make it a reality.
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