Wishful Thinking Makes for Great April Fool’s Humor
by Pravin on April 1st, 2008 in news.
I’m sure most of you already figured out that yesterday’s posting about version 4.1 of the PS3 firmware was actually an April Fool’s joke. The PS3 firmware versions aren’t up that high in the first place, and each subsequent paragraph should have only have added to the story’s improbability.
Here are some of the interesting April Fool’s jokes that were made on the topic of HD DVD yesterday. The techniques seem to fall into two categories: laugh at you, or make you laugh. Here are some of the “laugh at you” jokes, meaning that they’re presented as official sounding news designed to make a true April Fool of you:
- Chinese Company ‘Pri Laneo’ resurrects HD DVD at CDFreaks.com
- Toshiba, NEC and Memory-Tech announce HD DVD+ over at DVDCritiques.com
This one claimed that a Chinese company had purchased all HD DVD intellectual property licenses and technologies, and would soon start worldwide shipments.
The three companies had joined forces to present a new 60GB version of HD DVD that would definitely beat Sony’s Blu-ray this time around. This joke was long and detailed and probably did its job rather well.
This next one takes a middle approach. Though it sounds official, there’s enough room for you to figure out that something is probably afoot: Sega announces a new game console featuring an HD DVD drive.
Finally, there’s the “make you laugh” kind of joke where the idea is more about waiting for you to figure out that joke is happening. This is the style of the posting presented here at the site yesterday, as is this one entitled Toshiba to Sue Everyone Who Didn’t Buy HD DVD over at Celluloid Heroes.
The best one of these had to be ThinkGeek’s Betamax to HD DVD convertor which had an accompanying video:
(click here to view the video at YouTube if it is not visible above)
The main reason that some of these jokes might have worked is wishful thinking on the part of many HD DVD fans who wanted to hear that the format could make a comeback.
Did you fall for any of these jokes? Did you find others? Share them in the comments.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
You B@$T@RD$!!! I fell for it, BIG TIME! I actually forwarded this page to my friend and he’s been calling me non stop to inform me, over and over again, that I’ve been had. NOW I catch on to the whole April Fools bit. I’m an IDIOT! You guys got me good! By the way, I haven’t seen any posting on your site about Circuit City’s 50% off select HD DVD tittles sale. I went to Best Buy and they matched the sale on some of the tittles too! You should post it and let everyone else that uses your site as an up to date sale news source know about it! Keep up the great work. HD DVD 4 LIFE…err, well, you know what I mean…PEACE!