April Fools' Day 2026 prompted a wave of playful announcements and limited-time modes across the gaming landscape, with studios leaning into absurdity and tongue-in-cheek promotions. What follows is a roundup of the year's most notable pranks and temporary features.

PUBG: Battlegrounds introduces Prop Hunt
A limited-time Prop Hunt mode ran in PUBG: Battlegrounds from March 30 to April 7, offering a lighthearted alternative to the standard battle royale formula. Matches split 12 players into three Hunters and nine Props; Props hid as inanimate objects while Hunters searched a contained area. Incorrect shots penalized Hunters by reducing health until a late-match Fever Time removed penalties and boosted firepower. The mode appeared across Arcade maps including Rondo, Vikendi, and Miramar.

Fonte: https://pubg.com/en/news/9889

Pokemon Pokopia embraces Family Guy humor
A promotional piece dubbed Pokemon Pokopia leaned into a well-known Family Guy gag by presenting a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube Sudowoodo. The novelty item was framed as a decorative and promotional prop with exaggerated uses, presented purely as an April Fools' stunt.

PowerWash Simulator becomes a dating sim
The PowerWash Simulator team revealed Date the Dirt, a mock dating-simulator spin on the grime-cleaning franchise. The joke posited dirt and grime anthropomorphized into romanceable characters, reframing the series' cleaning mechanics as courtship.

Fonte: PowerWash Simulator Date the Dirt trailer

Payday adds an NPC life mode
Payday's April 1 update inverted expectations by placing players in an NPC role, living a scripted civilian routine. The mock mode emphasized mundane tasks—job rejection, routine errands—and discouraged heroic interference during heists, satirizing the franchise's criminal focus.

Fortnite gets surreal changes
Fortnite's seasonal April Fools features enlarged character heads, finger-gun emotes, rideable llamas scattered across the island, fall-damage immunity with exaggerated sound effects, and a shoulder-riding mechanic that allowed infinite stacking in skilled hands.

Fonte: Generated by ABN – Copyright free

Promotional oddities rounded out the day’s chaos with equal parts satire and creativity. Level Infinite and Shift Up teased an absurd decade-long open-world roadmap for Goddess of Victory: Nikke, while CD Projekt Red introduced Project ROACH—a tongue-in-cheek hobby-horse controller for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Mojang Studios joined in with Herdcraft, a playful twist on Minecraft that replaced inventory management with creature command mechanics. Elsewhere, Konami leaned into the bizarre with a novelty body pillow inspired by James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2, and Sega embraced internet culture with intentionally crude “Sanic” merchandise. Additional gags—from genre mashups to deliberately unhelpful UI tweaks—blurred the line between parody and prototype, leaving players with a familiar question every April 1: joke… or soft launch in disguise?

Suggested Links
Goddess of Victory: Nikke (Level Infinite): https://www.levelinfinite.com
The Witcher official site (CD Projekt Red): https://thewitcher.com