April Fools On My Dad: GI Edition

As some of you may have seen from previous blog posts, I love elaborate pranks. I've pulled a lot in my life, but I've found that my favorite person to prank is easily my father. He's always genuinely annoyed by the pranks, but he also has the sense of humor to recognize how funny a good one can be. Unfortunately, this is the first April Fools since I moved to Minnesota from Kansas, so it was time to enlist some help for this year's joke.

Considering I couldn't be there in person to pull it off, I knew it couldn't quite be on the scale of the water cup prank, but I still wanted it to be time-consuming and annoying for my father (preferably early in the morning as he's heading to work). I also wanted it to be immediately apparent to him that I was behind it, so it would be best to keep it gaming-related.

Issues of Game Informer aren't exactly in short supply around these parts, so I sent a box with about 50 old issues to my friend Derek back in KC. Between the hours of 2am and 5am, Derek meticulously taped individual pages of GI to my dad's car. Each issue usually has around 100 pages, so I seriously overshot the amount he'd need. It only took three or four issues to cover the entire SUV, and Derek threw the remaining dozens of issues on top of the car itself.

I apologize for the lack of clear shots, but the pictures are below. Derek's phone had its memory erased somehow, so most of the shots were lost. However, you'll still get an alright view of the vehicle that my dad's girlfriend shot from the window, as well as a nice shot of my visibly-annoyed father pulling issues off the roof.

I want to get crazy-elaborate for next year, perhaps even driving down myself to set it up. If any of you have ideas for a ridiculously annoying prank (that won't cost hundreds of dollars), send them my way at dan@gameinformer.com or @danryckert on Twitter.