Every year or so at TRMK we try to come up with a good April Fools joke, no matter how
cool or
strange. As previous years, the idea for this year didn't really come the day or two before. This time my idea came to me in the early morning of March 31st, giving me one day to put it together. And I had a lot of work ahead of me...
The idea was to
stage a leaked video of a prototype Mortal Kombat game for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform. I figured it's name could be
Mortal Kombat: Touch.
But I wanted this to be kind of believable, so I contacted
Mortal Kombat series co-creator,
Ed Boon, to see if he wanted in on the gag. I asked him if he'd like to play along by adding something to do with 'touch' to his website
noob.com for
April Fools Day. He was in for the joke, so I went to work the night of March 31st putting together our scheme.
We could have just created a video and timed the tilt movements, but decided to go with something with more realism. Luckily I currently work as iPhone/iPod Touch software developer, so it making something realistic was doable. After burning the midnight oil on the 31st, I developed a prototype using ripped sprite animations found online. The game actually functions on the device as you see in the video. You can move the character forward and back with simple turning of the device. Contrary to what many thought, it was NOT a video playing back on the phone.
Actually, the extent of the game's functionality is featured in the video. If I were to walk off too far to one side, the characters would walk off the stage. I also had a big bug with cloning the character, that I didn't have time to fix. So I had to do the video over a few times if the bug appeared. Here's a few direct screenshot examples:
Nasty Clone Image Bug
WAY too far right
I finished the project just before midnight on April 1st. By then Ed had updated
noob.com and added the numbers
20.15.21.03.08 which decode to the word
TOUCH.
Ed's Clue (Still There Today??!)
It was perfect for our setup. The idea would be to record it at a quality that looks like someone did a quick video capture of the game, nothing high quality to make it appear staged.
He also added the
joke about him leaving Midway, which gave us even more meat to develop the whole "leaked" story. So we let that news fester for a bit first, then at noon we put out the story and the video clips, and the rest is history.
It seemed some people either
really loved the idea,
were indifferent or
completely hated it. Some even
called us gullible!
The main goal of this event was to have fun. We used to do one almost every year. Back then we would delete the story after the week was over to make sure that no one would think the story was true if they were reading it in the
News Archive. Now we just tag the story with "April Fools" and
leave the stories in the
archive.
If you are interested, I will be posting more screenshots and videos of the MK Touch "game" later this week over in our "temporary"
Mortal Kombat Touch GameRealm.
