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.
“Wendy’s should not have a game that’s this good,” Stephane Cotichini, founder and game director at 81Monkeys, the studio behind WendyQuest, told Polygon in a video call. (For the record, 81Monkeys was not named after the viral 2025 news story about meth dealers attempting to smuggle 81 monkeys across the Thailand-Cambodia border. Pure coincidence. “Somebody forwarded me the article the day it broke and I was, like, ‘Seriously? How?!’” Cotichini said. “Of all the numbers of monkeys, it had to be our number?”)
WendyQuest started as many projects in the indie gaming world do: funding. 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.
“Normally, I would have ignored the email, but because he said they’re fans of the game, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll hear them out.’ So I get on a call and I find out it was Wendy’s. 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.
Ultimately, writers at 81Monkeys rewrote “99%” of the script, according to Cotichini. Everything still had to fly by corporate for brand-safety reasons, but there are some unmistakable nods to the competition: The logo for WendyQuest’s villain, Dr. Mechborg, is a giant golden “M.” “Sure, sure, serving billions is great,” MechBorg says in his introductory villain proselytizing that’s mandatory for most every JRPG. “But it’s time I make billions.” He then directs his army to “cut corners.”
I’ve played a little bit of WendyQuest, and to quote the kids, it slaps. Beyond its immediate 16-bit-era vibes, the combat system is the main draw. The system is built around a gauge that rapidly fills up at the bottom of the screen. You have to press the attack button as close to full as possible; tap too early and you’ll deal less damage or miss your attack, but if you get it right, you’ll deal maximum damage. It’s a nice touch that keeps WendyQuest from feeling like yet another Final Fantasy clone. The game is pretty funny, too; its jokes-per-minute ratio is on par with TV shows like Veep or 30 Rock. Cotichini is right: Wendy’s should not have a game that’s this good.
“Initially, they weren’t gonna credit us,” Cotichini said. “I mean, that’s the nature of this type of agreement, right? We’re just a silent partner, we’ll make this game, and then they launch it.”
But he pushed back. In late 2023, when the project initially began development, AI was out in the wild, though not yet the industry-demolishing force it is today. AI grows more unpopular every year, but gaming audiences in particular react with visceral repudiation; even a trailer that features AI-generated assets can prompt a major company to reverse on a dime and issue a public apology.
“You want people to know that it was 100% human-made by an actual indie studio,” Cotichini said.
That ethos is reflected in a line of bolded text front and center on the Steam pages for both WendyQuest and World of Anterra: “100% human made.”
“Part of why World of Anterra is as good as it is, and I know the world hasn’t played it yet, neither have you, but it’s because of the time it took to bring it to life. It’s because of the struggle it took. All of that comes across in the product that ends up being created, and I think that’s essential. So the more AI is used to make a game, the worse the game becomes,” Cotichini said. “Because the more you speed up that process, the less opportunity you have to improve it.”
Earlier in World of Anterra’s development, 81Monkeys dabbled with AI for project management and efficiency, but found that despite promises peddled by the likes of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the tools actually increased costs and decreased productivity. They also found that generative AI offered solutions for problems that already had solutions. Cotichini floated the idea of using AI to help speed up the creation of NPCs, for instance. “They were, like, ‘Why don’t we just make a script to do that?’”
For WendyQuest, according to Cotichini, the marketing team at Wendy’s actively pushed 81Monkeys to steer clear of AI tools and workflows.
No one could claim that WendyQuest is as in-depth as, say, Final Fantasy Resonance or other big-budget RPGs capitalizing on the nostalgia trend du jour. But there’s a real richness — and more importantly, a real authenticity — to its design. This is why Songs to Listen to in a Wendy’s Parking Lot ended up resonating so much with retired scene kids. These were real songs written by legit artists who we actually listened to in Wendy’s parking lots 20 years ago. In an era where McDonald’s is using AI to create nightmare fever dream ads and implement dynamic pricing algorithms, Wendy’s investing instead in the arts stands out.
“I think that creative work in general has gotten watered down over the last couple decades,” Cotichini said. “And the reason is because it became more influenced and controlled by business interest and less by the creative. Now, I actually see a swing the other way.”
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That might sound like an oxymoron coming from the mouth of the guy who’s making a game for a company with a $2.2 billion market cap. But really, why should it? Is the Wendy’s logo being on this thing any different than Sony’s or Microsoft’s or, hell, even Nintendo’s? (None of gaming’s three biggest companies started out as video game publishers.) Yes, it’s marketing, and yes, it is transparently transactional. But the games industry is facing down its fifth year of a dry spell for traditional funding models. That’s not changing any time soon. If a Fortune 500 company was debating how to allocate 0.5% of its 2027 marketing budget, would you rather it be spent on a month of YouTube preroll or on a year of overhead for a budding independent studio?
“The industry’s really suffering right now. Things have never looked more dire,” Cotichini said. “This is the thing that I hope will come of WendyQuest. Wendy’s spends some millions of dollars in marketing every year. WendyQuest costs a fraction of that. So many brands out there do the same thing. My hope is that when people see WendyQuest — and that, actually, if a studio cares about a branded game, it can be a really good game — that more brands seek partnerships like we made with Wendy’s. I think that could become an alternate funding source for so many really talented indies in the industry.”