Team Rocket Takes Over Pokemon Social Media Accounts for April Fool's Day

Pokemon fans should prepare for trouble on April Fool's Day.

Team Rocket has completed a surprising coordinated takeover of the Pokemon.com webpage and Pokemon social media accounts. Fans of the video game franchise first realized that something was amiss when the friendly face of Pikachu was suddenly replaced on social media accounts with the dreaded Team Rocket logo.

As part of their takeover, Team Rocket released a brief video announcing their grand scheme....which (unsurprisingly) is to steal Ash's Pikachu. Over the course of the day, the Pokemon social media accounts showed Team Rocket's latest attempt at capturing Ash's Pikachu....which eventually ended with the group blasting off again and the Pokemon social media team regaining control of their accounts. You can check out the full storyline on the Pokemon Facebook and Twitter pages.

Team Rocket also took over Pokemon.com and posted several articles related to Team Rocket and their place in Pokemon franchise. Not only did Jessie, James, and Meowth get a spotlight, the website also posted "Performance Evaluations" for several Team Rocket members that appeared in Pokemon Red and Blue. The website's "Featured Pokemon" were all Pokemon that were owned or are owned by members of Team Rocket over the years.

The Pokemon TV app also got in on the action, as they posted several Team Rocket-centric episodes of the Pokemon anime series to join in on the fun.

While Pokemon Go didn't have a tie-in with the Team Rocket takeover, they had their own fun for April Fool's Day. Game developers swapped out certain 3D assets with 2D assets, which gave the game a distinctively retro feeling. They also added spawn points for Murkrow around the world and added Slowpoke spawn points in the Kawaga prefecture, which had renamed itself as "Slowpoke prefecture" for the day and had installed Slowpoke as the region's new governor.

While April Fool's Day isn't as popular as it used to be (a side product of the fake news epidemic), we thought the Pokemon team had a lot of fun with the day. It's nice to see a brand try something besides a fakeout to celebrate this goofy holiday.

What was your favorite April Fool's Day prank? Let us know in the comments!