KFC: Horror VR Training Game — Ryan Wesley Peterson

The cooks at every Kentucky Fried Chicken have been hand-preparing original recipe chicken from scratch each day for the last 70 years.

How do we get a new generation of employees to understand KFC’s commitment to quality food? Lock them in a VR kitchen with an obsessive, meticulous and menacing Colonel Sanders until they learn to make chicken ‘the Hard Way’.

Obviously.

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Every serious game needs an extremely serious and dark trailer with serious key art. We had no choice but to make a serious trailer of our own featuring a serious cover of the 1967 Tommy James & The Shondells song "I think we're alone now". The internet was confused.

Here are spooky some moments from the game...

Making the horror real

The team trained with KFC's head chef Bob in Louisville, learning and documenting the proper cooking technique, then we got about turning it into an effective training and unforgettable (read: terrifying) time.

In only 6 months we crafted the entire thing from scratch in house. We partnered with concept artists and expert 3D modelers to create all the props and the hyper-detailed environments. Our engineers worked directly in Unity to develop the immersive experience for the Oculus Rift platform, complete with 3D spatial sound design and a dynamic soundtrack that changes depending on a player’s actions or situation.

Originally, this was an internal tool for KFC, with only 1 event in NYC showcasing it to a limited group of press and industry folks. Eventually Facebook (owners of Oculus) got ahold of it and were so impressed that they released it for free and featured it on the Oculus store for Christmas. In the first two months, folks across the world spent almost 3,000 hours getting virtually berated by Colonel Sanders while learning to fry chicken ‘the hard way’.

I’m just gonna let that sink in.

Get it for free on the Oculus Rift here

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Made for:

KFC at W+K Lodge

My role:

Game design, Art Direction, Storyboarding, Script development, Music supervision, Sound Design direction, Trailer concept, Key-art development, Event supervision, Oculus Store design. I also wrote and recorded the KFC Jingle vocal parts.

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With:

Creative: Freddie Powell, Jason Kreher, Lloyd Winter, Micheal Brandes, Jonathan Minori
Production: Dennis Hanley, Saira Weigel,
Micah Gendron, Teresa Lai
Development: Ryan Kee, Nate Horstmann, Michael Latzoni, Roger Braunstein, Jesica Marquez
Concept Art: Nicholas Weigel
Technical Artist (Unity): Scott Garner
3D Artists: Mark Lundgren, Jeff Ackley,
John Van Unen, Daniel Moreno,
Foley Artists: Natalie Huizenga, Noah Woodburn