The resistance against the AI art apocalypse is being televised in a marketing campaign about burgers. Over the past year, Wendy’s — yes, the same Wendy’s known for its square burgers, thick milkshakes, and unlikely stewardship of a mid-tier donut chain — has made waves through a series of unconventional creative partnerships. Amid slumps in sales and attention, Wendy’s has turned to popular artistic mediums, like music and video games, to try and reverse course.
The buzziest Wendy’s-affiliated project was the post-hardcore EP Songs to Listen to in a Wendy’s Parking Lot, which featured six tracks written by musicians from bands with legit emo cred, like Anberlin, Blessthefall, Silverstein, and Winona Fighter. Look, I am as sorry as you are to hand anything to Big Corporate, but all six tracks are straight bangers. (Just listen to “She Said She Didn’t Want Fries” and try to tell me you didn’t have that on repeat in a Wendy’s parking lot in 2008.) On the heels of that album release is the classic JRPG riff WendyQuest: Legend of the Four Corner Stones. Like Songs to Listen to, it boasts a similar unmistakable authenticity.
Or, rather, a lack thereof. For the past several years, 81Monkeys has been working on an ambitious, systems-heavy pixel art RPG called World of Anterra. Though World of Anterra was successfully funded through Kickstarter in 2022, the scope and ambition of the game continued to swell, and the team found itself rapidly running out of runway.
But as any indie or even mid-sized game developer will tell you, funding in the games industry has all but evaporated since the early 2020s gold rush. Things were looking “dire,” according to Cotichini, who said he had post-Kickstarter funding conversations with 60 prospects that went nowhere. Then an email landed in his inbox through the studio’s website form.
And when I found out what the game was, I instantly knew we were the right team,” Cotichini said. Within a week, 81Monkeys signed the deal for WendyQuest, allowing the studio to continue working on World of Anterra. 81Monkeys split its team 50/50 to work on both games. The Wendy’s people apparently had the general picture and the overarching creative vision for WendyQuest, but the team at 81Monkeys still had its work cut out for it in turning it into a viable video game.
They revised the battle system away from purely turn-based combat to a more active one. This echoes one of the studio’s core principles: Nostalgia has to feel contemporary, otherwise it’s just going to feel dated. Cotichini also acknowledged that while the original script had strong ideas (the Wendy’s marketing team is known for its witty social media posts), it didn’t quite click for a video game, where the writing isn’t just about telling a narrative but also about making a world feel real and lived-in.
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