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April Fool's 2003: A PostmortemWe don't usually do this... but yesterday was a rather odd April Fool's day, with a LOT more 'jokes' than usual, and folks are still confused about what's real and what's not. I know that if I DON'T put this online, we'll continue to get notes for years about some of this stuff. We're going to make this page available so that when irate fans want to know about this trick or that one, they can be pointed right here. If you're morally opposed to having the joke spoiled, stop reading now.
The HistoryBungie has always had some fun April Fool's jokes, and we try to follow suit. On April 1, 2001, we changed our site over to look like our biggest competitor at the time, Rampancy.net. (The site is still online, and the joke was rather elaborate; you shouldn't find any dead links. There are places where form submissions lead to an April Fools message... but there shouldn't be anything that doesn't work.) On April 1, 2002, we put up our version of The Bungie Store (which hadn't come back online yet - that's what it USED to look like). Folks WANTED to believe this one... everyone wants a Grunt Plushy. I'm astounded by how close our copy of the Halo Soundtrack came to the original.
The PresentThis year, it turned out that we did a lot of LITTLE things... but there were so many of them, folks weren't sure what to believe. (When in doubt, as Brian Towne says, believe nothing.) Here's what happened here. The Halo Story Page and the Marathon Story Page switched places. Sadly (imo), the Marathon guys noticed first. Perpetrators: Finn and mnemesis (with the approval of Hamish Sinclair). The Halo Story Page put up a review of the new book, Halo: The Flood. It's been replaced with a REAL news post about the book... but it had people going for a while. Perpetrator: mnemesis and Finn. c0ld vengeance posted a picture to our forum purporting to show the letters 'TR' spelled in lights on the underside of the Truth and Reconciliation. It was nicely done, and was one of the few pranks that wasn't doubted for a while. Perpetrator: c0ld vengeance. We posted a pair of screenshots from the Mac Halo build. They weren't real. They were composited from a number of different shots (most of which can be found in our Screenshots section), and with some extra help from Dave Candland, at Bungie. (The shots of early weapons are not available online, and sadly, cannot be made available.) Reaction seemed to vacillate between 'I HOPE they're real!' to 'wow, those are so fake!' I was pretty amused by the fact that folks used the number of dots on the radar as evidence that the multiplayer shot wasn't real... the fourth dot does represent a real player, as can be seen in the original shot I started from. And with all the criticism leveled at the 'weak Photoshop job', nobody seemed to notice that the guy carrying the flamethrower is missing most of his right arm. A writer from Inside Mac Games felt the need to debunk this one with some information posted by a Westlake employee on their forum... I'd have hoped that they could have let it go until today, but sometimes official folks aren't willing to go along with jokes that might affect their professional reputations. Perpetrator: Louis Wu (with help from Evil Otto, SketchFactor, and RogerWilco, and indirect help from Marty O'Donnell). Cybrfrk pointed out a mouse in some webcam shots. The fact that he chose white was his undoing... but the photoshop job is actually quite good. Perpetrator: Cybrfrk. mnemesis quit the Story Page staff, because of the material released by Bungie. (If the Halo Story Bible is publicly available, why would we even need a speculation site?) Perpetrator: mnemesis (with a push from Bungie). Forum regular Shishka put on an incredible performance as ShishkaH, a nearly illiterate, shouting 'hacker' who 'took over the forum'. (For a while, he even 'tagged' our FAQ box. Long-time visitors can probably pin down who he was parodying... the rest should simply be amused by the consistency with which he played his part. (Do a search for posts by ShishkaH on April 1 in our forum if you missed it.) There were also several Halo-related pranks at other websites... turns out we can't really break 'em down without getting permission from the perpetrators. You're on your own for them. There is one you might have missed, which we do have permission to debunk: emildux, of the Seventh Column Chapter CobaltNova, put up a news post about a $100,000 tournament (with lots of details). He definitely snagged a few people - check out the writeup over at CobaltNova. If more went on that you thought might be an April Fool's joke that DIDN'T get mentioned, we're going to have to refer you to the people involved; that's all we're allowed to tell you about. (Hint: if you were taken in by information at another website, and all references to that information is gone today, it's a good bet it was a joke.) |
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