We're sitting in a conference room in Razer's recently opened offices, located across the street from one of the conference halls housing the week's Game Developers Conference. Travis Wannlund sounds a little sad when he says it. "Nobody really remembers our first April Fools' joke." Strip away the nonsense, like that Chroma Energy butter, and you're left with something that sort of grew out of both Razer's philosophical approach to design and its strong relationship with customers. Should it send an alert when the toast is done? Spray colored energy butter onto the bread? Burn a Razer symbol into the toast? Maybe it should have a magazine for holding sliced bread, ready for the toasting, or the ability to eject bread onto a plate sitting on a table. Razer needed to know what people wanted in their machine. The prank announcement declared that the toaster was going to happen, but only with the input of fans. The toaster was born out of an inside joke between Razer and its fans. This year's prank, a Razer-themed toaster given the codename Project Bread Winner, is a prime example of that. But it's also made it easier to blur the line between what Razer is really working on and those similarly strange, over-the-top annual April Fools' announcements. That willingness to think outside the box has helped the company win a string of Best of CES awards and shake up the laptop and peripheral industry a bit. ![]() That might be because the rest of the year, Razer seems so willing to announce, and sometimes even sell, weird devices. While many companies in the game industry create elaborate April Fool's Day pranks, Razer's eight-year history of pranking often wins the day. They never heard back from Microsoft or Verizon after the announcement on the site was emblazoned with a big red "April Fools'!" the next day.
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