'Just the right kind of weird:' How the secret weapon of a /pizza command let EverQuest 2 slice into WoW and accidentally end up topping Pizza Hut on Google

GamesMMO’Just the right kind of weird:' How the secret weapon of a /pizza command let EverQuest 2 slice into WoW and accidentally end up topping Pizza Hut on GoogleWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Darkpaw Games, Daybreak Game Company, Pizza Hut)

Everquest 2 concept art with pizza photoshopped into 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.

“Everybody was like, ‘This is weird’. But it was just the right kind of weird."(Image credit: Chris Kramer)

Chris Kramer

“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. We got EverQuest 2 mentioned on The Tonight Show.”

At the time, EverQuest 2 was just a few months old, and it was a bad moment to be running an MMO. “The constant pressure was that Warcraft was kicking our ass,” says Kramer, a gaming industry veteran and former PR head for Sony Online Entertainment. “The games came out literally days apart and Warcraft blew up. Obviously.” On paper EverQuest 2 was the safer bet. It was the follow-up to an MMO that had been dominant for half a decade. “WoW was just a really, really slick version of EverQuest,” Kramer says. “The original WoW team were all hardcore EverQuest players.”

Rather than a mere clone, however, WoW represented a quantum leap forward in approachability. Blizzard streamlined online play, making it easy for players to find each other and removing the things that were “terrible-slash-amazing” about EverQuest, like experience loss. To make matters worse, SOE was competing with itself. After five years and eight expansions, the original EverQuest playerbase wasn’t about to uproot itself and adopt a new home—not even the next-gen condo next door. “They made an exponentially better version,” Kramer says, “and they already had that amazing world that they built up over three Warcraft games. So they were very rightly kicking the crap out of us.”

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(Image credit: NBC, Jay Leno - The Tonight Show With Jay Leno)

Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in 2006

Enter Louis Figueroa. As a member of SOE’s business development group, his job was to drive awareness of the company’s games through partnerships. “In that era, eight fucking logos would pop up before the game would start, and all those logos were paid for and placed,” Kramer says. “That was Louis doing his best to help bring money in on the project.”

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Figueroa remembers a particularly long lunch where different departments came together and laughed about the slash commands EverQuest players used to create macros and shortcuts for certain actions—like /sit, /walk, /run or /attack. “Adding our own amusing slash commands to the already swelling list, we joked about creating commands for /beer, /laundry, and /pizza,” he says.

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. “Most laughed or thought it was silly, but no one said they would block it.”

(Image credit: Darkpaw Games)

Everquest 2

We were so successful telling a story about /pizza that it annihilated Pizza Hut from SEO for about a monthChris Kramer

We were so successful telling a story about /pizza that it annihilated Pizza Hut from SEO for about a month

Then the San Jose Mercury News got hold of it. “They were one of the first newspapers in the US to have a really good online presence, and because they were in Silicon Valley, a lot of their writing was focused on tech,” Kramer says. “There was a guy writing for them who was almost a tech gossip columnist. He broke news. And so I just sent him a note. It was really simple, just an email that said, ‘We’re going to let people order pizza through our online game.'”

The writer immediately contacted Kramer to hear more. “He wrote just a couple sentences, but because so many people at that time were reading his column, it splashed everywhere outside of games,” Kramer says. “And everybody was like, ‘This is weird’. But it was just the right kind of weird. It was the sort of thing that people could put on their blog or website, and they could make a funny joke, and the whole thing was very clickable. It was perfect.”

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.

(Image credit: Darkpaw Games)

Everquest 2

It didn’t matter that, functionally, /pizza was simple and throwaway. “You didn’t really order a pizza within the game,” Kramer says. “Your EverQuest character didn’t pull out a mobile phone and call Pizza Hut.” The kind of browser implementation that enabled /pizza has since become commonplace with the rise of microtransactions. But the idea was evocative. “It was this magical, fun thing,” Kramer says. “From a PR perspective it was a gift from heaven.”

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Figueroa still works at Sony today(Image credit: Louis Figueroa)

Louis Figueroa

“Louis comes to me and he goes, ‘Hey man, you need to stop pushing /pizza out there,'” Kramer says. “‘You’ve gotta shut it down. I just had an hour-long meeting where Pizza Hut was yelling at me. They want to end the promotion immediately.'”

“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.” (Figueroa himself doesn’t recall the debacle, but it “does not surprise” him.)

It was then that Kramer knew that /pizza had been a marketing coup like no other. “It’s great that Jay Leno made a joke for grandparents,” he says. “But honestly, having EverQuest 2 knock Pizza Hut out of Google SEO? That was like, ‘Good job, everybody.'”

(Image credit: Darkpaw Games)

Everquest 2

/pizza was a phenomenon written in a language the Sony Pictures execs could understand

/pizza, though, was a phenomenon written in a language the Sony Pictures execs could understand. “There were several different audience segments that were attempting to reach with our communications campaign, and one of those segments were the Hollywood folks that we reported up to,” Kramer says. “Mission accomplished. There were a lot of folks in the Sony studios who were patting themselves on the back for that.”

Kramer, meanwhile, now works as a comms exec for Tencent—and points out that the subscriber numbers SOE once battled for would barely register as a rounding error in Fortnite. “There are probably more people playing League of Legends at this minute than were ever subscribed to EverQuest,” he says. “But at that point in time, it certainly seemed gigantic, it seemed unbelievable. It certainly drove a very profitable business for a very long time.”

This year, EverQuest 2 and its predecessor arecelebrating their 20th and 25th anniversariesrespectively—the two games now coexisting comfortably, while WoW sits undisturbed on its frozen throne. One MMO had to win, but as it turns out, none had to die. And hey: if you search for Pizza Hut now, the delivery company is the very first result. All’s well that ends well—especially if there’s a slice of steaming deep dish in your hand.

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A gift from heaven#

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