Wiki

Stop 'n' Swop Confession


Just the other day we revealed how we stumbled across a Stop 'n' Swop teaser site, supposedly made by Rare. We've got some bad new folks, it's just another RWP April Fools prank. We fooled many, but did we fool you?

This years joke was conceived very late on. We'd actually purchased the stopnswop.com domain a long time ago, and plan to use it for other things. Manders came up with the idea that we should definitely use the domain for this years April Fools. The design was mocked up, and the ice key and eggs were modeled and textured. All that was left was to rip apart the existing Banjo-Kazooie Silverlight code and modify it for our needs (We didn't have time to create a fresh one).

Afterthoughts were to add extra keywords in the metatags. Bottles Revenge, Ice Kazooie, and Blackbeard. Wait....what's that? Blackbeard? Haha, yeah, we were laughing so much at the idea that we completely overlooked that mistake.

It was a great success this year, with other website forums getting suckered in. Poor George was inundated with questions about the site, and all we could do was chuckle to ourselves. Another investigative website editor actually left a voice mail on the phone of the fictitious Kevin Anderson, who we had listed as the domain guy at Microsoft.

Things that could/did rumble us
  • We didn't change the domain registration until Sunday evening. We were praying it would propogate in time (Luckily Grey convinced us to do it the night before)
  • Mandy put the article live without transfering the files over to the Stop n Swop website (a couple of people might have noticed that)
  • Blackbeard in the tags (!)
  • Apache 404 message (which Jason picked up on in a thread and later helped us cover)
  • The SNS site shared the same nameservers as the RWP
  • The biggest one that we had no control over was the IP (Hylian found this before anyone, but didn't ruin the fun)

Thanks to everyone that smelled a rat, but didn't say anything, and shame on those who were deliberately trying to spoil the joke, and posting several times afterwards when nobody was acknowledging you :p

Until next year folks. :)
%s1 / %s2