April Fools' Day 2010

April 1, 2010 was an April Fools' Day that fell on a Thursday. In the Pokémon fandom, many websites pulled hoaxes on and supplied false information to gullible fans.

Hoaxes

Fan sites

Bulbagarden

Bulbapedia as "Slowpedia"

• Bulbapedia temporarily rechristened itself as Slowpedia, "the sluggish and mellow Pokémon encyclopedia", complete with Slowpoke family imagery and pink Slowpoke colors throughout the site.
• Bulbagarden forums were redesigned to become 503 Service Unavailable Garden, with the logo "No April Fools Joke is able to take this request".

Other fan sites

• PKMN.NET "announced" that the site would be slightly shifting its focus away from Pokémon and become the #1 fansite focusing on Manchester United footballer, Wayne Rooney, whom the site says is secretly a Pokémon addict. The site was also slightly redesigned with Rooney imagery.
• Dogasu's Backpack was completely redesigned with a total shift in focus from Pokémon to Digimon and renames itself to Numemon's Backpack. This change was so great that its Bulbapedia article jokingly became a candidate for deletion because "it was no longer a Pokémon fansite".
• Legendary Pokémon broke news that, according to the official Japanese Pokémon website, players of HeartGold and SoulSilver who upload a Slowpoke nicknamed "Movie13" to the GTS, looking in return for another random Slowpoke, will receive a blue level 30 Slowpoke holding a "Lock Capsule", which can be transferred to the upcoming Generation V games and allow the player to capture Zoroark.

The PokéMasters on April Fools' Day 2010

• The PokéMasters changed the themes of its main site and forums to "cute" themes, disabling the style changing dropdowns on both. The forums also implemented a word filter that automatically changed various swear words into words such as "hug", "rainbow", and "pie", and also redirected the link back to the site to a Rickroll site. Additionally, the site's announcement of the Yellow Forest Pokéwalker event was written in the language of Pikachu.

Psypoke on April Fools' Day 2010

• Psypoke's main page was totally replaced with what appeared to be an older version of the site, with the header text saying that the site's estimated completion date would be "roughly three years from now". The site also asks for visitors to click on its ads, such as the fake banner ad on the right of the page, to help it generate revenue; a reference to when it had heavy advertising. All content related to anything released after the original Gold and Silver versions was removed from the fake homepage. Clicking on any of the links (including the aforementioned fake ad) took visitors to the actual main page.
• Similar to the previous year, Collectorviper showed an image revealing the existence of three promo cards with Zorua and Zoroark on them that were due to come out in July. The resource links goes to two blogs of the people who made the cards in the image, with at least one person showing the cards she made and revealing that it was an April Fools' prank. The next day, Collectorviper also revealed that it was a hoax and that the co-conspirators helped set it off.
• PokéCommunity changed its name to Slowpokécommunity and locked the skin as a pink, Slowpoke themed one. This was to reflect the fact that these events happened on April 2nd, the day after April Fools' Day.

Other

• 1UP.com showed a fake trailer for a Pokémon go-kart racing game similar to Nintendo's Mario Kart series.
• Toonzone.net stated that Piplup would be Pikachu's successor as the mascot for the Pokémon franchise.

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.