April Fool's wrap up: My favorites

Ah April Fools day… a day for pranks to be played on everyone you can think of.

I myself tried to Rickroll some friend’s phones, but I think the site went down, and I was quite sad. A friend of mine found a blue screen of death screensaver which he installed on two family members’ computers, resulting in both people freaking out about having a virus installed on their systems, and one even running a virus check.

There were also some great pranks played by some websites. Both little things and more impressive which may have fooled some, but not others. Below are my takes on the pranks.

1. Legend of Zelda - The movie: I know of at least two people who were fooled by this. And as I had first suspected, it was a prank by IGN (and Rainfall Films). They updated the page with the trailer at 12:01am with “Yup, you guessed it. The Legend of Zelda trailer featured above is part of an elaborate April Fool's Day prank. Check back in later today for more details on the IGN/Rainfall Films collaboration that resulted in this "love it or hate it" piece of videogame movie history.” As I said previously, it actually looked pretty decent. I’d see it in theaters if it came out. Maybe this will make Nintendo perk up a bit more about making a Zelda movie.
2. World of Warcraft Bard Hero Class: Blizzard realeased details about a Bard class, a la Guitar Hero. It’s fairly detailed, with some funny pictures to accompany the article. Hell if it were real, I’d be making a bard once I got the new expansion later this year
3. World of Warcraft The Molten Core: Probably my second favorite April Fool next to the Zelda trailer. I totally cannot wait to play this with it’s sweet 192i resolution, 6 different boss shapes, sweet 2D graphics… and it has sound?? Oh man that’s so sweet. So much better than WoW…
4. Virgle: Anyone want to go and colonize Mars? Well… as cool as that may sound, it was a hoax by Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. You could actually submit an application to join them in their desire to go and colonize Mars.
5. Google’s “send in the past email”: This was a hoax, obviously, but damnit I wish it was becoming a feature. Even if it did rupture the space/time continuum. This was the hoax that actually had me fooled and initially I was looking through Gmail to find it and test it out. Upon further reading of the page, was when I realized it was fake. Well at least one person had me fooled for a bit.

Some of the smaller hoaxes included Digg changing the buttons, so that once you dug a story, instead of the number increasing it went to a random symbol, like Pi or +. Fark had an initial page that had an image of a guinea pig inside of a server case with the caption “OMG hacked by pigs!” Engadget changed their layout to a more pink/T-mobile look after being sent a letter the previous day from Deutsche Telekom/T-mobile to “stop using magenta” on their website. ThinkGeek also released a fake product called Spazztroids, chock full of sweet, precious caffeine. Amazingly it’s only 15 calories per serving too!

So all in all some fun stuff this year. I can’t wait to see what these sites decide to do next year. Especially IGN, considering now they have to top a fake movie trailer that was done really well.