Humble Bundle — April Fools’ Day

When I arrived at Humble Bundle, it was around the height of internet April Fools’ Day jokes. Back then, any company that had any semblance of a fun brand did something for AFD. Especially coming from Woot, a company known for its long, elaborate AFD celebrations, I was surprised that a games company like Humble Bundle was doing nothing.

So I saw this as an opportunity to strengthen our brand and give us a new project that diverted from our usual daily tasks.

Considering that we typically sold games or books, the joke here would be that we were entering a new line of business offering new digital goods. We worked as a team to come up with something cheeky that we could actually sell so that as much as it was a joke, there’d be an actual tangible good for people who took the chance and purchased it. To try to prevent buyer’s remorse, we put the proceeds 100% to charity.

Our first year, we created and sold fonts:

All dumb fonts that served minimal practical purpose. These were chosen by committee in creating a list of 7 punny, satirical fonts that our designer, Christina, then had the unenviable task of creating. She did a stellar job! If you bought these, you could install them on your computer and be writing telegrams in Bike Courier or secret codes in Sans Sans in no time.

Overall, it was a big success! We sold over 1,000 bundles and had a great time doing so.

So the next year we followed it up with the joke that Humble Bundle was expanding from the videogame space into the physical game space with old-timey games:

The font bundle was more of a surprise for our customers, but we went all out on this one, posting to our social media channels . . .

. . . and even creating a video:

But what exactly would you get if you bought it? Not telling. You should’ve bought the bundle! Nahhh, kidding. It’s been several years, so I’ll share that with you gratis! The bundle consisted of instructions to these various games, written and designed by our Humble Creative team:

There were some inside jokes in there (e.g., Stickball Premium being offered on top of regular Stickball was a parody of the DLC versions of games that are usually offered), and as a whole, the bundle was a hit with our audience, selling even more than the font bundle.

I haven’t followed the legacy of these bundles closely, but I know that they did do at least one more AFD bundle after I left. After that, internet AFD started to get a bit overplayed anyway, so if they stopped, I don’t blame them, but it was fun while it lasted, and maybe someone out there is writing a letter to their friends in Halfvetica telling them about their most recent Hoop Trundling adventure!