On March 21st, the Global BanG Dream server, referred to fans simply as ENdori, announced on Twitter that they would be doing a temporary song collaboration with Pinkfong’s viral Baby Shark song later that month, lasting 3 weeks. Of course, fans expected an April fool’s joke since it’s just around the corner, but little did they know, ENdori was as serious as they could be.

[News]🎸BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! X Baby Shark Collaboration🎧 Today we will be featuring the illustation of the original song , Baby Shark from Pinkfong🦈 Retweet & Comment if you love Baby Shark!🎶 pic.twitter.com/ubcy7oRo6O — bangdreamgbp_EN (@bangdreamgbp_EN) March 21, 2020

What is Baby Shark?

Baby Shark (released June 2016) is a nursery song that went viral, starting in Indonesia, from a challenge where people performed a dance to it. It was easy to replicate and very popular at the time so it spread like wildfire worldwide. The song itself sits at 4.9B views on YouTube as of writing this.

How did we get to this point?

The most plausible theory of how this happened is as follows; ENdori, just as the other servers, conduct user surveys to find out what their players think of the game. Those same surveys also leave a lot of room for people to suggest things that can be added by the devs later on. And I, the writer, distinctly remember that there was a space where players could suggest future song collaborations. Now, memes are popular like it or not, and every game has a crowd that answers their surveys with joke answers, but ENdori was the first to take it seriously. Enough people answered that survey with Baby Shark that they actually made the collaboration happen.

This is a first in BanG Dream! GBP history. The mobile game historically only featured non-original songs as covers by the franchise’s bands, and this limited-time collaboration is the first time that isn’t the case. While it all might be just a big joke or misunderstanding, it still made history.

How are people taking it?

With mixed reactions such as these, I’m sure a lot of people are in for a fun few weeks.