Behind the Emote: "Scary Face 2000" (GBscary)
Added 2017-06-11 20:07:52 +0000 UTC"Scary Face 2000". Bet you didn't know that not only did this emote have a proper name, its name is also nearly a short sentence on its own!
Between 2006 and 2011 Draco formerly ran customer service for Club Penguin on a popular gaming website & forum. In lieu of using regular emoticons, this forum elected to use the emoticon set from the Club Penguin game itself because most of the popular expressions were in there. Naturally, one of the emoticons was your generic :D or "big smile" face. No big deal, really.
Except it sort of was a big deal. You see, Club Penguin's ":D" face was so similar to the logo for Yahoo Instant Messenger that there was allegedly a trademark dispute over it and Club Penguin was forced to change it. The result was a redrawn "big smile" emote that showed rows of teeth on the top and bottom. It looked terrifying. The forums kept the original "big smile" emote because nobody was paying attention to what we were doing, and the new one was added with the shortcut ":scary:".
The new "scary" emote became an immediate meme within the community and its visage was plastered all over avatars, signatures, and edited into screenshots of other games by the community. Eventually a massive (and awfully done) vectorized trace was made of the emote and used as an image macro; usage of the 1000+ x 1000+ graphic eventually became grounds for a temporary ban. Consequently, the image macro version of the emoticon is also the picture used for this Patreon post!
"Scary Face 2000" as it was known was eventually added to Gatorbox's line-up of emoticons to coincide with our broadcast of Club Penguin's final online hours.
(But what's this business about "2000"? Was there an original "Scary Face"? There was! On a forum Draco used to manage from 2004 - 2008 the community borrowed the :D emoticon from AOL Instant Messenger and named it the "rape face". It was retconned to "scary face" to make its usage more socially acceptable. The original emoticon is attached to this post for posterity.)
