EverQuest 2 aimed to defeat World of Warcraft. The idea was simple yet genius. The emote /pizza caused global attention – and stress with Pizza Hut.
Since the worldwide success of World of Warcraft in 2004, many MMORPGs have tried to capture the attention of potential players. Especially the spiritual predecessor of WoW, EverQuest, wanted a big piece of the MMO pie with its successor EverQuest II – or rather, in this case, the MMO-pizza.
As WoW exploded with success and EverQuest II struggled, the developers came up with various promotions to draw more attention to their game. One of them was the simple method of a chat command, namely /pizza.
This not only led to a tremendous amount of media attention but also to conflict with their partner Pizza Hut.
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What was going on with EverQuest II? PCGamer conducted an interview with the people responsible for EverQuest II at the time and uncovered a curious story.
Chris Kramer, the former PR chief of Sony Online Entertainment, viewed the conflict between Warcraft and EverQuest this way:
The constant pressure was that Warcraft was kicking our butt. The games were released just a few days apart, and Warcraft exploded. Obviously. WoW was just a really, really clever version of EverQuest. The original WoW team consisted of hardcore EverQuest players.
Furthermore, Warcraft was already established in gaming.
They created a significantly better version and already had this incredible world that they developed over three Warcraft games. So, they absolutely kicked our butt.
As EverQuest II remained in the shadow of Warcraft, they not only wanted to poach players from World of Warcraft but also needed to convince the community from the original EverQuest to switch games. To achieve this, they sought various collaborations and PR measures to raise more attention to the game.
During a lunch break, they joked about the different slash commands of EverQuest, such as /sit, /run, or /attack. These were used for macros in the game. More in jest, they talked about the idea of adding their own commands like /beer, /doinglaundry, or /pizza.
And precisely this last idea would ultimately be the stroke of genius.
The original idea was a somewhat self-deprecating joke. They saw gamers – and themselves – as the lazy guys sitting in front of the PC who surely wouldn’t get up to make themselves something to eat. Intended as a joke, which was later referenced multiple times in the South Park Warcraft episode, it evolved into a PR idea.
This collaboration went as follows: EverQuest II entered into a cooperation with Pizza Hut quite shortly. The idea was simple: When entering the command “/pizza” in EverQuest II, a browser window opened, and one could place a pizza order. Essentially, the /pizza command was nothing more than a link executed in the game. There wasn’t even a character emote associated with it.
This PR coup is likely to go down in history as one of the most brilliant for EverQuest II. Within a few hours, the news was picked up by various American media. Ultimately, even major outlets like Fox News, CNN, or the Wall Street Journal reported on the in-game command.
However, there was one party that was very upset about the /pizza command just a few days later. No, it wasn’t the players and not even the competitor Warcraft.
Pizza Hut was upset.
Why was Pizza Hut mad? The whole attention led to the fact that when Googling the term “Pizza Hut,” they no longer got the official Pizza Hut page as the top result, but instead, news around EverQuest II. The game and the coverage around it completely overshadowed the pizza chain in the SEO search results.
Pizza Hut wanted to end the collaboration as quickly as possible and even had to buy placements in search to regain the top spot (via pcgamer).
Did all of this lead to great success? Even though the whole action was one of the most successful advertising measures for EverQuest II, it ultimately did not lead to pushing the MMORPG titan World of Warcraft off its throne. But at least: even nearly 20 years later, both games still exist – peacefully side by side.
Kramer, who now works for Tencent, explained that back then it was about player numbers that today have little significance:
Right now, probably more people are playing League of Legends than EverQuest ever had in subscribers. But at that time, it seemed enormous, yes incredible. It fueled a very profitable business for a long time.
Funny what a small command in an MMORPG can cause.
