I always mean to do something fun and awesome for April Fool’s Day, and I never remember. But maybe it’s just as well: there are people and groups pulling off better stunts today than I could ever dream of perpetrating. I think the list of crazy April Fool’s Day stunts has been well-covered across the Internet, so I thought today I’d flip it a little – things that happened on April Fool’s Day that were real events, but people assumed they were part of the day’s mischievous festivities.

1. Google introduced gmail in 2004. Given Google’s propensity for April Fool’s Day pranks, plenty of people assumed they were just kidding. At the time, free e-mail with a whole gigabyte of storage was a completely new concept. The following year, they increased it to two gigs.

2. When Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father on April 1, 1984, some people figured it was a hoax. After all, a famous singer being killed by his own dad – and a minister, at that? It does seem a little unbelievable. Sadly, the public quickly found out that it was all too real.

3. Somewhat similarly, when comedian Mitch Hedberg died while on tour in 2005, many of his fans thought it was another one of his jokes. He died on March 29, actually, but it wasn’t released to news outlets until the 31st, and a lot of newspapers started printing it on the first.
4. Back in the day when Sega and Nintendo were bitter rivals, no one would have thought that their hit characters Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario would team up in a game. But that’s exactly what happened when “Sonic and Mario at the Olympics” was announced in 2007. Sega and Nintendo announced it via a joint press release a couple of days prior to April 1, but fans just assumed there was no way it could be true. But it was, and it was so successful that a sequel is planned to honor the 2010 Winter Olympics.

5. Let this be a lesson to us all: If you want people to take your death seriously, don’t die on April Fool’s Day (to be safe, the days leading up to April 1 should also be avoided). When the media reported the death of King George II of Greece on April 1, 1947, the public largely thought it was fake. But he had really died of arteriosclerosis.

6. Apparently the April 1, 1970 announcement of the AMC Gremlin was too laughable for people to consider real. After all, who would name a car that? And a car expected to compete with the VW bug was just silly. AMC was serious, though, and the Gremlin was produced from 1970-1978.
7. What started out as a joke actually hurt the Korean stock market in 2003. A bunch of Chinese and South Korean websites picked up on the joke that Bill Gates had been assassinated and reported the news, whether they had been suckered in or were just playing along. People believed it was true and reacted – the result? The Korean stock market dropped 1.5%.

8. Also in 2003, two rival video game companies merged. Square was the company behind Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy (among other games) while Enix had versions of Tomb Raider and Riven (again, among lots of other things). But in truth, the two companies had been discussing and considering the merger for at least three years.

9. I doubt anyone thought this was an April Fool’s joke at the time, but I think it’s worth noting that Apple Computer was founded by Ronald Wayne and the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) on April 1, 1976. Hmmm… coincidence that Woz was voted off of Dancing with the Stars on the eve of the 33rd anniversary of Apple? OK, it was. And he totally deserved it. He may be a great guy, but his dancing was terrible.
10. On March 31, 1946, officials released a tsunami warning in Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands. Many thought it was a prank and didn’t take the warnings seriously, but when a tsunami did indeed devastate the next day, 165 people were killed and more than $26 million in damages was caused.

And here’s a bonus:

11. Another Google incident that wasn’t a prank: in 2007, the company sent an e-mail out to its employees at a NYC office warning that a python was loose in the facilities. Definitely sounds like a prank, I know, but it was true: an engineer kept a ball python named Kaiser in his cube and Kaiser escaped. The e-mail to employees apologized for the awkward timing and assured them that this was no April Fool stunt.

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