I can’t tell you how much fun we had with this year’s April’s Fool. Your reactions and feedback showed us that it was quite the success and I want to thank you all for your responses! I also want to apologise to those of you who took it a bit too seriously and got upset.
I think one of the main reasons it caused such high emotions is the route many gaming companies are currently taking with NFTs and ingame stores. That’s why we picked this topic for our April’s Fool in the first place, because it is so close to what is actually really happening on the market, that you either need to joke about it or simply start crying.
For the whole team the preparation of a new April’s Fool is also an invaluable bonding experience. Our team chats are suddenly filled with childish giggles, secret after-work meetings and mad laughter during this time of the year and I love it!
This year the team decided to surprise me as well:
End of February we started a first meeting where everyone proposed their ideas for our next April’s Fool. Boti came up with the idea to joke about NFTs and the reactions from the team instantly showed that he nailed it. Everyone wanted to contribute to this, but they wanted to surprise me as well. So for the next month I was kept out of the process. I saw unscheduled video meetings taking place after work and everyone suddenly went silent or suspiciously changed topics when I joined. I was only allowed to see the result about a week before April 1st. And I was blown away: They had not only done massive research on the - what we then called - “marketing mumbo-jumbo” that is on the internet, but also created several pages including a “real” wallet and marketplace including a fake counter so the wallet seems to actually count coins and offers a coin-mining-counter in the editor as well. I was really impressed by the genuity of the whole approach and actually had to defuse it a bit.
There is this awkward moment before you release the April's Fool to the world, where you start to question yourself: Should we really do it? Will everyone hate us for it? Will they understand it?
This year it was even harder than last year, because our “Dance your Map AI” from 2021 was so obviously ridiculous that there was no chance anyone would take it for granted…but NFTs and CryptoMining? I am really glad that the majority of you share our weird sense of humour and enjoyed the laugh!
But if you feel that we should stop with this childish behaviour,
here’s a petition to make us stop.
I want to end this with a big thank you to everyone who helped create and share this year’s joke and I can’t wait for next year!
- Till Lammer, CEO DungeonFog
