Every now and then a company releases a fake product announcement for April Fool’s and then is shocked by how badly some people actually want that product. This is what happened to ThinkGeek.com a few years ago when it teased a Tauntaun sleeping bag based on a famous scene from the beginning of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The joke led to “an overwhelming tsunami of requests” that drove Think Geek to eventually release the product for real.

But while Think Geek’s product was a joke turned real, retro gaming hardware retailer Hyperkin seems to have done the opposite—it used April Fool’s as a way to sneakily test the market for a smartphone peripheral that would add a Nintendo Game Boy-like facade and control scheme to a mobile device.

“A lot of you were speculating that the Smart Boy is an April Fools’ Joke,” Hyperkin wrote on its Facebook page. “Well, it sort of was. We ‘leaked’ it with the initial intent of testing the market, seeing whether or not it should be something we’d actually make, under the guise of an April Fools’ Joke. Looks like you awesome folks ACTUALLY WANT IT, so the Smart Boy is now in development! Thank you all for your enthusiastic responses!”

While Hyperkin says the response to the “fake” product has been overwhelmingly positive, not everyone seems to be onboard.

“The size and cartridge of a gameboy and it adapts a modern piece of technology to do the job in a way that it by itself could do a lot better through emulation,” wrote Reddit user IronMew. “Isn’t this the worst of both worlds?”

Another obvious criticism of the Smart Boy product is the possibility that it could infringe on trademarks held by Nintendo, who is notoriously strict toward third parties using its IPs.

Other users took the opportunity to point out that Hyperkin has already been accused of violating software licenses for its use of code taken from open source retro gaming project RetroArch. According to RetroArch’s creators, the project is covered by non-commercial licences, which it says Hyperkin violated by using the code in its commercial products.

Image credit: Hyperkin