History of April Fools’ Day Sprites
Approved by A Cake Wearing A Hat . Written by platinumCheesecake and sharpclaw
The year is 1997. Little Timmy loves playing the new Pocket Monsters game his mommy got him for Christmas. It hasn’t been two weeks, but little Timmy’s already beaten the game using the totally awesome Charizard he got from Professor Oak. Little Timmy thinks he’s hot shit. Little Timmy is a spoiled brat because his pushover parents let him play video games for ten hours a day. And little Timmy is brimming with the naive confidence of an infant sloshing around in a loaded diaper.
Smug little Timmy invites his only friend, Next Door Kyle, over to battle. His sweaty hands can barely plug in his link cable, he’s so eager to show off his Charizard. It knows Fire Spin, Flamethrower, AND Fire Blast.
“Daaaamn, Timwad,” says Kyle moments later through a mouthful of Gushers and Pepsi Blue, having 6-0’ed Timmy’s entire team with a single Golduck. “You’re so bad at this game. I bet you don’t even know what Rhyhorn evolves into.”
“Of course I do!” little Timmy whines. “It’s Rhydon—”
And Next Door Kyle bellows a response that would echo through time.
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It’s been over 25 years since little Timmy’s fateful gaffe. Today, historians recognize Next Door Kyle’s ensuing proclamation as the oldest Pokemon joke ever made. As April Fools’ Day scholars, it’s our duty to preserve these moments of timeless comedy so future generations can appreciate the glories and disgraces of the past. The April Fools’ Day spriting team in particular has been hard at work cataloging relics of outdated Millennial humor to carry on Next Door Kyle’s heroic legacy.
We recall how, in 2013, the Based God (bearing that most splendid and universal moniker of everlasting hilarity) called down to his oracles and warned of a great flood of shitposts. Wisened prophet
Layell heeded the call, and set about gathering four of every Pokemon sprite—front, back, front shiny, and back shiny—to usher onto the good ship Pokemon Showdown. And with this effort came Showdown’s first April Fools’ Day collection, a staggering catalog of some 700 sprites, jokes, and whatever the hell that Celebi gif is. To honor this tireless campaign, the Based God (again, hysterical) smiled upon Layell’s epic memes and spared society from a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick of uber proportions, lol lmao roflcopter.
After this first Great Work, the April Fools’ Day project lay mostly dormant until 2017. With the seventh generation of Pokemon released that previous November, and the months until the anniversary of the project quickly ticking down, it seemed no one would answer the call to create sprites for a new generation of hopeful gamers. But then, lo, a second prophet arose from the crashing seafoam of obscurity, beautiful and urbane. User
LifeisDANK, with a glint in their eye and a song in their heart, arose from the jetsam and shouldered the heavy, magnificent burden of Layell’s legacy. On the first day of spriting, LifeisDANK said let there be light—and the Solgaleo sprite came into existence. In the following six days (give or take two months) LifeIsDank single-handedly drew the entire Alola Pokedex, But Funny. And it was good.
In 2019, the eighth generation of Pokemon was announced, and as before, AFD’s previous muse had moved on. But now, tradition loomed large, and some began to whisper that there would come another. That the project would. Not. Die. In the deepest reaches of a fabled realm of chaos and Discord, a new cabal plotted to overthrow the status quo. In a server mysteriously dubbed “Hoopacord,” a small yet devoted group of degenerates, has-beens, and shitlords saw their chance to seize the great project and instill within it a renewed and terrible vitality. With a great gnashing of teeth and slapping of dweebs, they wrestled the spriting project from the hands of the Ancient Ones and began drawing dated 2000s references with blistering speed. They worked, and worked, and chuckled, and worked—and when the fiftieth Spongebob joke was finished, the spriters gazed upon their creations and smiled, knowing this blesséd, curséd collection of .pngs would mark them the heralds of a new and momentous era of Fools.
Having tackled the Gen 7 alternate forms, CAP pokemon, Gen 8, and now Gen 9, historians agree the Hoopacord era is still “going strong.” The spriters’ strength is in their unity, allowing them to better gorge their egos upon the praise they receive from proposing one dank sprite after another. It is unclear how long the Hoopacord era will last. But no matter the shepherds who toil under its long and terrible shadow, the AFD project shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
