Did you, like me, wake bleary-eyed from your slumber, check your phone and think the word had gone mad this morning?
Ah yes, today is the 1st April 2021 and that means it’s April Fool’s Day. A time to pull practical jokes and hoaxes, or as is more often the case these days, a day of panicked marketing meetings as brands try to balance something that is funny but still has a ‘Red Thread’.
And so, here we are with the best April Fool’s jokes from today that feature in the racing video game, esports and sim-racing world.
iGP Manager Hurdles
Hot on the heels of the mobile game’s 3D announcement earlier this week comes another one – the ability to fly over racetrack gantries. Replete with dramatic music, you could almost believe it for a few seconds, but it’s clearly a joke and one that made us chuckle. Heck, this even took us back to a time of cheat codes within games. Make it happen, iGP.
Next Level Racing and Team Fordzilla alleviating ‘sim-racers bum’
All jokes aside, sim-racers bum is probably a thing. 200 hours prepping for an esports tournament must surely result in a numb posterior for some. The TFZ Advanced Sim Seat looks to be an insert that helps cushion your rear and comes in four versions: Sporty RS, Cheekcane, Popstar and Velvet.
If you visited the landing page, there is a scrolling gag and at the bottom it says “Bummer! You’ve been April Fooled!” with a sign-up to win a GTLite set-up. Bravo.
DiRTRally.txt
The DiRT Rally team had a fun time this morning by announcing a new game – DiRTRally.txt. My dad’s first experience of video games was a text-based golf game where you would type a command and it typed back if you’d hit the ball or not. You relied on your imagination to paint a picture. It must have been wild…
The DiRT Rally April Fool’s joke is based around a text rally game that involves typing in commands that result in pace notes being called and ultimately a crash. Not a real game though, folks, remember that.
Thrustmaster and Fanatec going at it on Twitter
Fanatec’s April Fool’s plan was to post about a fake direct drive wheelbase that lowers the entry price by simply cutting the existing DD1 in half. Pretty good.
But then Thrustmaster waded in on social media and well…
Speaking of direct drive, someone made this epic Lidl cost-price special. Oh, we can only dream of prices like this…
