GTA IV responsible for Rickrolling, Says Fox News

Funny, in what appears to be a rehashing of an article originally published the week before Grand Theft Auto IV came out on April 22nd – we just noticed that Fox News re-ran a story this past week giving GTAIV credit for inadvertently helping create the long-running meme of RickRoll-ing.

They’ve pinpointed it to the day of infamy when we broke the Internet with the release of the first Grand Theft Auto IV trailer (“Things Will Be Different”) on March 29th, 2007.

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.