Give Pikachu A Face

2008exploitableclassic

Published August 24, 2026

Give Pikachu A Face is an exploitable drawing game built around a blank template of Pikachu's head, which users fill in with any face they want. It started as a 4chan /b/ thread in 2008 and kept resurfacing on forums like Something Awful, GameStop, and OnePlus for more than a decade.

exploitable templatespokemondrawing fad memes4chan memeslate 2000s memes

Overview

Give Pikachu A Face is an exploitable image game built around a blank template of Pikachu, the Pokémon mascot2. Participants take the empty face area and draw in whatever they want, from cartoon expressions to celebrity portraits to grotesque scribbles. The head-only crop is the most common canvas, though some editors work with full-body Pikachu shots too3.

The appeal is the contrast between Pikachu's soft, familiar silhouette and whatever unhinged face someone bolts onto it. Threads collecting hundreds of edits still pop up on old-school message boards, and the format works as a lightweight drawing prompt for anyone with a paint program1.

Origin & Background

Platform
DeviantArt (source image) / 4chan (viral spread)
Creator
Bioviral; anonymous 4chan /b/ poster
Date
2008

The source drawing came from DeviantArt user Bioviral, who posted a Pikachu illustration to their page on June 6th, 20042. Four years later, in 2008, a 4chan poster dropped Bioviral's image into /b/ with a call for anons to fill in the blank face. The archive link to that thread is dead4, though a KnowYourMeme contributor going by Dragod is credited on the site's entry as claiming responsibility for the original /b/ post3.

How It Spread

The game jumped off 4chan and started showing up on hobby forums within a year. On April 25th, 2009, Something Awful user Melted Clocks opened a Give Pikachu A Face thread that ran for pages of user submissions1. That thread was promoted into Something Awful's Comedy Goldmine section on June 28th, 2009, the site's showcase for stand-out community posts5. A separate thread appeared on the GameStop forums around the same window6.

The template kept resurfacing every few years on unrelated communities. On October 15th, 2014, a fresh Give Pikachu A Face thread went up on the OnePlus phone forums, drawing edits from users with no obvious link to 4chan or Something Awful7. On November 5th, 2017, the Facebook page Listables published a roundup of standout edits from across the game's history8. That kind of periodic revival is why the format still turns up on new platforms almost two decades after Bioviral's original drawing.

How to Use This Meme

Grab the blank Pikachu template, open it in any image editor, and draw a face inside the empty area. Common conventions include swapping in famous faces, exaggerated cartoon expressions, or deliberately crude MS Paint scrawls1. Threads typically encourage posting your version as a reply so the whole gallery builds in one place.

Frequently Asked Questions