Webmonkey, along with the rest of Wired, ignores April Fool’s Day pranks. Which is to say I don’t post about them, not even the good ones. But occasionally an April Fool’s prank is good enough that it makes the leap from joke to real thing — like MMOAsteroids.

It started with a post on Seb Lee-Delisle’s blog where he claimed to have built a Node.js-based real-time multiplayer version of the classic Asteroids videogame (albeit without the asteroids). That turned out to be an April Fool’s prank, but the idea was compelling enough that now there really is a real-time, multiplayer Asteroids game on the web. It’s based on Doug McInnes’ HTML5 Asteroids and uses the as-yet-unreleased Firebase API.

I’m not sure about the “massive” part of MMOAsteroid (it appears, based on posts at Hacker News, that the game randomly assigns players to different boards to avoid overwhelming the screen and making it unplayable), but otherwise it’s pretty awesome. And highly addictive.