The MMO developers thought up /pizza as a joke, but it became a viral sensation just when they needed it.
The year is 2005, and Jay Leno has just made a crack about the fast food habits of EverQuest players in the opening monologue of The Tonight Show."It was very much like, 'Hey, these nerds living in their basement, what are they going to do next? Are they just gonna put IVs in their arms so that they don't even have to get up?' It was the typical stupid Jay Leno joke for grandparents," Chris Kramer says."But we didn't care.
But in 2005 it was Everquest 2, not World of Warcraft, that made it on The Tonight Show by tapping into something practically all MMO players were guaranteed to love: Pizza.With EverQuest's house divided, Warcraft was handed a flawless victory in its first year, and SOE's marketing team was left scrambling to win attention.
Lunch ended, but the idea of /pizza continued to swirl around Figueroa's head. It was both a joke and a serious crossover promotional opportunity. He began cold-calling pizza delivery companies, and spent a day moving from office to office, consulting game designers, producers, PR, community developers, and company president John Smedley—anyone he thought might veto his experiment."No one loved the idea, but they didn't hate it either," Figueroa says.
Something about the archetypal online gamer refusing to leave their chair for sustenance tickled the mainstream, and more than a year before South Park's culturally defining"Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode aired, /pizza caught fire. Within a week, Leno had delivered his line about EverQuest 2 to a late-night national television audience.It didn't matter that, functionally, /pizza was simple and throwaway.
"We were so successful telling a story about /pizza that it annihilated Pizza Hut from SEO for about a month," Kramer says."I think Pizza Hut had to start buying placement for search, and the executives were furious." From the off, Figueroa was worried about what the players would think."I didn't think the primary issues would be technical, but cultural," he says."Bringing a real-world element inside a fantasy-world game, and whether this might alienate gamers by compromising the immersive fantasy experience, was my biggest fear." You can still find the odd forum post decrying the misuse of Christopher Lee character Lucan D'Lere .
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