April Fools' Day 2014

April 1, 2014 was an April Fools' Day that fell on a Tuesday. In the Pokémon fandom, some websites pulled hoaxes on gullible fans.

Hoaxes

Fansites

Bulbagarden

• Bulbapedia adopted a Canadian theme.
• Bulbagarden forums were redesigned into Maple Garden Forums, adopting a Canadian theme. Other changes in the forums include:
  • Forum moderators having their usernames and avatars changed to reflect the theme. Most of them were named after famous Canadians.
  • Random Messages X became Friendly Maple Messages along with a multitude of other Canadian related topics.
• Bulbanews posted the following articles:
  • A real life Shiny Canadian baby being born using the Masuda method.
  • An insider spoils the next generation, which is based off of Canada. Contents include but are not limited to a regional Professor named Professor Maple, a legendary based on the steam-punk moose, an alternate evolution of Bidoof, and dual-purpose gyms which serve as a hockey rink or a sawmill.
  • Bulbagarden webmaster Archaic declared missing by Canadian authorities due to a computer error, which caused a deportation.

Other Fansites

• The PokéMasters changed its forum theme to a Finnish theme giving the site's name as "The Finnomasters." The forum banner featured Articuno and was designed by Finnish forum member Mikachu Yukitatsu.
• Pokémon Showdown! changed all the sprites on Pokémon Showdown to various fan-drawn sprites, like the previous year.
• PokéCommunity had a various amount of pranks all around the forum. Their main prank though was randomized forum descriptions.
• Marriland's News section announces an upcoming Black and White 3 release.
• PKMNcast.com published in their News section a fake CoroCoro scan of Mega Raichu. The Raichu was designed by Wil Brendel and the layout of the illustration was done by Steve Black Jr. The final design was printed, placed in a magazine, and the shot on a mobile phone to upload to the site for a more "authentic" look.
• Pokejungle pretended to have joined forces with Serebii and changed the Twitter account name and site name to Junglebii.

Others

• Google updated their Google Maps mobile application with a licensed, time-limited "Pokémon Challenge" mini-game running until April 2, 2014 at 02:00 PDT where users have to find and catch Pokémon scattered across the worldwide map. This is accompanied by a live-action announcement trailer depicting exaggerated augmented reality gameplay.
  • Google's Pokédex contains 151 Pokémon, spanning all six generations with 25 per generation (nine of them each were forms of starter Pokémon), along with Mew*.

Gallery

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  Catching a Pidgey in Google Maps

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  Viewing the Pokédex in Google Maps

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  Bulbagarden forums skin

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  PokéMasters's The Finnomasters

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  Bulbapedia skin

References

This article is a part of Project Fandom, a Bulbapedia Project that aims to write comprehensive articles on every aspect of the Pokémon Fandom.