The first ever Pokemon Sleep World Champion has been crowned thanks to the Pokemon Company’s hilarious April Fool’s Day gag this year, bringing a full-fledged esports-style competition to life for the passive, sleep-tracking app.
While Pokemon itself is competitive to the core, Pokemon Sleep is the furthest thing from that. The app’s sole intention is to track your sleep, handing out various rewards along the way for getting a good night of rest and forming healthy sleeping habits.
There’s absolutely no underlying competitive angle to it, the experience is designed from the ground up to be a passive app that merely idles while you snooze. However, flipping the script entirely, The Pokemon Company has now given us a look at how Pokemon Sleep could work as a competitive game.
Pitting a handful of the world’s top sleepers against each other in a blockbuster competition for the ages, this year’s April Fool’s gag brings us the first-ever Pokemon Sleep World Champions Tournament and it’s brilliant.
Labeled “the most unexpected trophy of the year,” contestants do battle over the course of the four-minute video in order to determine the very best sleeper of the bunch. From how quickly they doze off to their posture in bed, and even some surprise tactics like the “imposing sleep style”, each sleeper brings their own strategies to the event.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
“Good evening and goodnight,” play-by-play caster Chris Pillow says to open the broadcast, then introducing his co-host Kenny Mattress. The duo covered the “unprecedented shut-eye scrimmage” from start to finish, even falling asleep themselves due to the low-octane action on display.
Ultimately, it’s Lullababy who takes out the very first Pokemon Sleep Championship, in large part due to his sensational “Sheltered Sleep” trick, protecting him from a nasty fall off the bed and onto the floor.
Obviously a big-budget and long-winded advertisement for Pokemon Sleep itself, the production has nonetheless gone down a hit with the community, some even heralding it as the “Best April Fool’s [gag they’ve] seen on the internet in a long time.”
“Amazing production for a game which hasn’t even reached its first anniversary,” one player chimed in on Reddit. “Since the game was announced, the jokes about ‘competitive sleeping’ have been abundant, love that they took it to the next level,” another added.
