History of Game Usagi April Fools

March 31st, 2012 by

Game Usagi has always embraced April Fools like many fine tech sites across the Internet, but this year we’ve decided to commit ourselves to continuing to bring you hard-hitting news and reviews instead of sinking to wasting an entire day with jokes and frivolity.  Instead of our usual jokes this year we’ve decided to take a look back on April Fools past so we can remember bygone levity while looking forward to the future of… something.

Anyways, read on for a trip down memory lane.

2009

For 2009, we announced a name change to give Game Usagi more of an edge and the website was converted over to the new, hip site Game Badger. The website’s main banner, favicon, and most links were switched from our old Game Usagi logo to a similarly styled badger silhouette that had a PlayStation control pad on it instead of our usual NES-style one.  This name change was done so suddenly that even some of our staff was fooled and contacted the Editor-in-chief to question the logic of re-branding the website so suddenly.  We also gave our first ever Infinity/10 review score and the 2008 Usagi Game of the Year to the Nintendo DS game Imagine Wedding DesignerThe article is still a great read and informative if you want to hear about the best game ever made.

2010

On April 1st, 2010 we did a similar, but more comprehensive fake brand switch over to Game Unagi (Japanese for freshwater eel) and blamed it on our being purchased by a Japanese corporation called UnagiCorp, Ltd.  The usagi/unagi similarity has always been a source of punny humour, but we took it to the next level by changing not only all of the links and categories on our main site to feature an unagi covered in Xbox 360 buttons, but also our Twitter and Facebook accounts and our webcomic sister site Usagi Comix.  Good times were had by all, but Google re-indexed our website and Twitter account that day, so we were showing up as Game Unagi for much longer than originally intended. ^_^

2011

Last year we continued our 3-year streak of re-branding jokes with the military-themed Game USA G.I.  Some people had actually confused us for that before, perhaps blaming bad font kerning in our logo, so we thought it only natural to give them what they want.  For the sake of our actual readership, we left the social media pages alone last year, but we had fun with animated GIFs while doing what was surely our most flamboyant fake re-branding to date.  You can see a semi-broken archived version of how the website appeared a year ago if you’ve forgotten the glory of the animated GIFs or just want to once again bask in their radiance.  As a part of our festivities on that day we also posted a review of Uncle Sam himself, making him a Chuck Norris-like figure, whose image of Uncle Sam with Captain America still nets us a handful of hits on Google Images every month.

So, while that was a fun distraction, we’ll be preparing to bring you actual valuable gaming news tomorrow because just like many other news outlets, we know that what you crave is a monolithic, impersonal, commercial source for your gaming news and reviews issuing edicts from on high while stealing your time and money like we’re supposed to instead of one that tries in vain to weave pathetic humour and humanity into its articles with the hope of speaking to you on even ground and making you really feel like this website exists for your personal information and entertainment.

We’ll see you tomorrow.