April Fools' Day 2012

April 1, 2012 was an April Fools' Day that fell on a Sunday. In the Pokémon fandom, many websites pulled hoaxes on gullible fans.

Hoaxes

Fansites

Bulbagarden

• Bulbanews posted an article about several leaked upcoming games which included Pokémon Battrio for the Nintendo 3DS and a "demake" of Black and White for the original Game Boy, along with a fake trailer for the game created by Pokémon hacker Koolboyman.
• The Anime Forum also released a list of fake anime episodes which included the return of Giovanni and a battle between him and Ash.
• Bulbagarden forums were redesigned to become NOT Bulbagarden, with the forum taking on a look and theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey as though the fake announcement of the Bulbagarden forums moving away from Pokémon talk had just recently taken place.

Other fan sites

Pokémon Database 'corrupted by MissingNo.'

• Psypoke had shaking rainbow-colored text on the front news page along with a constant line of Bidoof marching down the page.
• Pokémon Database replaced all sprites with those of MissingNo. and styled the header to look glitchy. Regular sprites could be seen by clicking the "restart your game" link.
• PKMNcast.com followed last year's example and became distorted with images and signs of MissingNo. The banner had an image of MissingNo. on it, with various parts of the website missing, and the colors were changed.
• Pokécharms was rebranded as "KyruemCharms" with the slogan "We're PINGAS and proud of it".
• Pokecardex was taken over by Panini Cards, with the site transformed into Panini's imagery.
• Dogasu's Backpack took on the look and theme of 1997 as though the airing of the first episode of the anime was about to take place.
• Pokémon Marriland changed "Pokémon" to "Pocketmon" on every page of the site. Also, many icons and sprites were replaced with those of Bidoof, but the names of the Pokémon remained the same. In addition, a supposed Keldeo event that began April 1st was announced on the site.
• Pokeboard, a lesser known forum, made the mods appear to be banned. This was easily seen through as the mods could still post.
• The Cave of Dragonflies claimed to be permanently translating into Icelandic.

Miscellaneous

• This date marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Pokémon anime.

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