The History of the RickRoll

This was on FOX News Website...

The New York Mets announced that "Never Gonna Give You Up" had received 5 million online votes to become the team's new eighth-inning sing-along song — thanks to wise-guy Web sites like Fark and Digg that stumbled upon the vote and urged users to pick the Astley croon."

We've probably not gotten that many votes for anything before," Mets spokesman Jay Horwitz said in a telephone interview.

It's all just a bit of harmless geek rebellion, say Web pranksters.

"It's just one of those things we do" someguy Drew Curtis said by phone. "Just something silly. The moment we saw the possibility of voting for Rick Astley, they just started going for it."

Once the Mets realized what was happening, they quickly invalidated the results of the poll and decided that on Opening Day, April 8, they'd take the vote to the people.

When Astley's song was played, it was greeted with boos. The Mets had finally overcome rickrolling.

The History of the RickRoll

The origin of rickrolling goes back three years and involves an egg, a duck without feet and the video game "Grand Theft Auto."

In keeping with silly Internet humor, the director of the image-sharing Web site 4chan, who goes by the handle "moot," decided he'd play a joke and change the word "egg" to "duck" every time a user posted a message.

In time the phenomenon spread, and the word "eggroll" was replaced by "duckroll." When someone came up with the idea to redirect Internet links to an image of a duck on wheels, rickrolling's forebear, "duckrolling," was born.

Then in March 2007 came the release of the eagerly awaited first trailer for the still-upcoming video game "Grand Theft Auto IV."

So popular was the response that it immediately crashed game publisher Rockstar Games' Web site.

In what was to become a pivotal moment in Internet hoax history, someone at 4chan took the now-useless Web link for the "Grand Theft Auto IV" trailer and duckrolled it.

But instead of linking to the image of a duck on wheels, he or she linked to the Rick Astley video on YouTube.

Rickrolling was born.

When interviewed by the Los Angeles Times last month, Astley himself said he was OK with rickrolling and had no plans to capitalize on it, but he found it "bizarre."

Even 4chan's "moot" was underwhelmed at first.

"When I first saw it, I thought it was silly, stupid," he said in a telephone interview. "After hundreds of times, it got really catchy, I knew all the words. But on April 1, it really blew up. I was frankly very surprised when I saw a certain number of Web sites outside of Internet-culture sites running rickrolling as a prank."

It was April Fool's Day, and in an apparently uncoordinated move, Web sites everywhere rickrolled their readers.

Then came the Mets incident. Rickrolling had truly hit the mainstream - and now it shall die. Because we all know that something which was once silly because it was known to an elitist group of nerds that went mainstream and is known by all is now no longer funny.

It is now tired and stupid.

Henceforth:

I, Cap'n, promise I'm gonna' give you up
I'm gonna let you down
I'm gonna run around and desert you
I'm gonna make you cry,
I'm gonna say goodbye
I'm gonna tell a lie and hurt you

Good night sweet Rick.