About

"Ignore Hitler" refers to a series of user-submitted artworks on the mobile gaming app Draw Something that incorporate caricatures of Adolf Hitler regardless of its contextual relevance. The images gained significant attention after its creator launched a single topic Tumblr in April 2012.

Origin

The idea was conceived by Scottish artist Michael who noticed that players on the mobile app game Draw Something could easily cheat by spelling out the name of the object instead of drawing it. Michael began executing his idea by inserting Hitler into every Draw Something submission he worked on and on May 6th, 2012, he launched the Tumblr blog Ignore Hitler^[1] to curate his artworks as well as his friends' contributions.

"The game is Draw Something – you’re presented with an object to draw for your opponent to guess. I include gratuitous Hitlers in the drawing with no relevance to the actual answer and etch the phrase ‘IGNORE HITLER’ instructing my opponent to disregard the fuhrer’s presence."

Spamming of irrelevant images in turn-based drawing games has been seen before on Doodle or Die.

Draw Something

Draw Something is a mobile gaming application developed by Omgpop in which two players alternate turns to draw an object based on an assigned prompt and try to solicit the name of the object from each other in similar vein to how the word guessing game Pictionary works. The game was well received upon release, racking up 50 million downloads in the first fifty days. In March 2012, both the game and Omgpop were bought by Zynga for $180 million.

Spread

On the day of the blog launch, Michael posted more than a dozen examples of "Ignore Hitler" drawings, including a submission of Hitler wearing a red thong underwear which became the first notable instance of the series with more than 120 notes. The single topic blog was picked up on the following day by the internet news site Daily Dot^[7] in a short Q&A interview article with Michael.

Throughout the second week of May 2012, the Ignore Hitler Tumblr blog was covered by various humor blogs and tech news sites, beginning with Happy Place^[12], Kotaku^[6] and BuzzFeed^[2] on May 9th and followed by Geekosystem^[3] and Games News^[4] on May 10th. The site was also featured on the homepage of /r/gaming subreddit^[8] on May 9th, which received more than 1,285 points and 100 comments. Meanwhile, Ignore Hitler extended its presence across other platforms on Twitter^[10] and Facebook.^[11]

Notable Examples

Within the first 10 days, more than 100 drawings of Ignore Hitler have been submitted and featured via Tumblr.

Search Interest

External References