Smiling Friends Fans Have Already Added Gwimbly To Real Games

05.04.2024 - 00:43 / thegamer.com

Smiling Friends fans have already turned Gwimbly, a parody of mistreated platforming mascots like Crash Bandicoot and Banjo-Kazooie, into a real-life icon.

After months of waiting and teases from Adult Swim, we finally got our first look at the upcoming second season of Smiling Friends earlier this week as part of an April Fool's showcase. Not only did this include a release date for the season, May 12, and remade puppet versions of some of the first season's episodes, but the first episode of the new season was also fully released.

The episode, amazingly titled "Gwimbly: Definitive Remastered Enhanced Extended Edition DX 4K (Anniversary Director’s Cut)", focused on Pim helping out a mistreated and down-on-his-luck retro platforming mascot named Gwimbly who has been forgotten by the company that owns him and is now focused on microtransactions and battle passes.

This was, of course, a parody of characters like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and Banjo-Kazooie, who have all been given the same treatment over the last few console generations. As you'd expect from such a painfully realistic story, gamers instantly fell in love with him like they did those heroes, with many praising just how authentic his mannerisms and looks were to the retro games he's inspired by.

Of course, the natural next step for such an iconic fictional gaming hero is to make him an actual gaming icon, something that Smiling Friends fans have been doing with gusto over the past few days. Not only have they been going along with the bit and effortlessly pretending that Gwimbly has been here all along and that we've all just been waiting for his resurgence, but they've actually started putting him in real games.

Gwimbly has even retroactively been put into The Simpsons, as shown in this Twitter post from RenStarDeluxe . Poor Sonic got completely replaced.

Take Twitter user and GameBanana modder fireplace_2, for example, who managed to mod Gwimbly into Mario Kart Wii just a few days after his appearance in the episode. The mod appears to change Yoshi into the less-dishevelled version of Gwimbly that we saw in the episode as opposed to the modern version of the character.

That appears to just be the beginning of the Gwimbly fever, as there are already tons of posts on social media adding him into games, such as this one that has him doing his iconic victory dance over Mario in Super Mario Galaxy. Twitter is already full of requests for modders to add Gwimbly into Super Mario 64 and Smash Bros., so it looks like we can expect Gwimbly fever to keep running hot. Ooh ooh ooh indeed.