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 fast-food chain 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. All six tracks proved to be surprisingly solid productions. 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 that has caught the gaming community off guard.
"Wendy’s should not have a game that’s this good," Stephane Cotichini, founder and game director at 81Monkeys, the studio behind WendyQuest, said 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. It was a pure coincidence. "Somebody forwarded me the article the day it broke and I was, like, ‘Seriously? How?!’ Of all the numbers of monkeys, it had to be our number?" Cotichini remarked.
WendyQuest started as many projects in the indie gaming world do: funding. Or, rather, a severe 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. To manage the workload, 81Monkeys split its team 50/50 to work on both games simultaneously.
The Wendy’s marketing team 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 those ideas 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—given that 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 pass through corporate approval for brand-safety reasons, but the final product features unmistakable nods to the competition. For example, the logo for WendyQuest’s villain, Dr. Mechborg, features a giant golden "M."
"Sure, sure, serving billions is great," MechBorg says in his introductory villain monologue, a mandatory trope for almost every JRPG. "But it’s time I make billions." He then directs his army to "cut corners."
Players experiencing WendyQuest find that the combat system is a major draw. Built around a gauge that rapidly fills up at the bottom of the screen, players must press the attack button as close to full as possible. Tapping too early yields less damage or a missed attack, while timing it right delivers maximum damage. It is a design choice that keeps WendyQuest from feeling like yet another generic clone. Combined with a sharp script featuring a high jokes-per-minute ratio, the game has earned genuine praise from early players.
The collaboration also led to important creative boundaries regarding technology. "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 Cotichini pushed back. In late 2023, when the project initially began development, artificial intelligence was already a growing presence in creative spaces. While AI has grown increasingly unpopular among consumers—with gaming audiences in particular showing visceral repudiation toward AI-generated assets—the studio wanted to ensure full transparency.
"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 experimented with AI for project management and efficiency, but found that the tools actually increased costs and decreased productivity. They also found that generative AI offered solutions for problems that already had established solutions. When Cotichini floated the idea of using AI to help speed up the creation of NPCs, the team responded by writing a custom script to handle the task instead. For WendyQuest, Cotichini noted that the marketing team at Wendy’s actively encouraged 81Monkeys to steer clear of AI tools and workflows entirely.
While WendyQuest may not possess the sprawling depth of a massive AAA release, it carries a distinct richness and authenticity in its design. Much like the post-hardcore EP that resonated with former scene kids because it was written by legitimate artists, the game succeeds because real developers poured genuine effort into its creation. In an era where major competitors are utilizing AI for automated marketing campaigns and dynamic pricing algorithms, Wendy’s investment in independent artistry stands out as a unique corporate strategy.
"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."
While partnering with a major corporation carrying a multibillion-dollar market cap might seem contradictory to indie ideals, the financial realities of the modern gaming industry present few alternatives. With traditional funding models experiencing a prolonged dry spell, securing financial backing from non-gaming entities offers a viable lifeline. If a Fortune 500 company is going to allocate a fraction of its marketing budget toward promotional efforts, funding the overhead of a budding independent studio yields a far better cultural and creative return than standard digital advertising.
"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."
