Are there any good April Fools jokes today? For example, a few years ago Google announced a sewage based ISP (i.e. flush some fiber optic cable down the toilet and they would fish it out and connect it).
The only one I have come across is IGN article about the Nintendo Virtual Boy Pro.
I find it nuts when people do an april fool’s joke that could actually be a thing. Like turning the Switch into a Google Cardboard style VR device.
Didn’t they already do that for real with Nintendo Labo?
Did they? I know it let you make weird machines; I don’t remember a VR one though. But I also totally forgot Labo was a thing until you mentioned it so 🤷🏻♂️
VirtualBoy was also a terrible Nintendo product from the 90s, which adds to the joke even more.
Personally, I really liked it. I would strap it to my head and lay in bed to play Mario Tennis and… Metal something? It was like a robot SHMUP where you flew forward into the action, so to speak. Only two games I had for it. Played more tennis than the other one since the other one gave me the same kind of motion sickness that VR now does when I try to move without actually moving. lol
The annual chance to soft announce the stupid ideas that may be crazy enough to work with plausible deniability.
There used to be a fun store called Think Geek that would announce a bunch of new products on April 1st. Some were clearly impossible, some they were actually planning to launch (usually more mundane stuff like shirts), some were things that were more “this is a joke but if enough people like it/express interest we’ll see if we can actually manufacture it/license the IP.” I liked the site and realized only a few months ago that I hadn’t seen anything from them in a long time. They were independent, then bought by the parent company of Slashdot but kept operating largely as normal, then were eventually sold to Hot Topic and I think that’s when it kind of went away. Looks like their site now redirects to GameStop.
GameStop bought them a couple of years ago. That was the deathknell.
It’s a shame; they had fun, often unique stuff. Since GameStop didn’t seem to keep that stuff I’m not sure what buying Think Geek got them that they couldn’t’ve just done on their own.
I was familiar. I even have some stuff still; shirts and desk toys. At one point they sold an external PC bay drive made by Thermaltake that was a literal cupholder/ashtray with a car style cigarette lighter that, supposedly, was functional. I never actually plugged it in though (put it in my PC, but didn’t plug the lighter into the molex connector).