Halloween Gaming: PUBG Meets KFC

 

It's the spooky season again!  With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to recommend some games I like to play when scares are in the air!  First up: PUBG.

You might not think of PUBG as a scary title, but I've always believed it was the most traumatic experience in gaming ever.  That visceral emotional reaction is probably due to me being simply awful at this game. I mean, seriously bad. I was reminded of this just last night when I got the drop on another player and emptied half a magazine of ammo and missed almost entirely! Ha! This is the only game that I find so intense that I have no doubt my blood pressure measurably increases while playing it. 

If you are not familiar with PUBG, it is a battle royale game built upon the idea of hunting your fellow players with a variety of weapons. The player scavenges on large, multi-kilometer maps that consist of varied terrain, from woods to depopulated towns.  The entire experience is reminiscent of Richard Connell's Most Dangerous Game or Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale.  The premise is pretty terrifying in its own right, but the gameplay adds to the horror. To begin with, a large part of PUBG involves scavenging all the weaponry and supplies you will need to survive this last-man-standing contest.  That can take a considerable amount of time as you walk (or drive, if you can find a working car) across the map searching homes and farmsteads for the gear you need.  I can assure you that there is nothing more frustrating than investing that time and covering that distance only to see the effort go up in smoke when another player who gets the drop on you.  

Speaking of, PUBG ramps up the tension by dropping players into one big competitive pit, something that results in newbie players facing off against longtime PUBG pros.  As you can imagine, this results in some intense gameplay, especially for people like me that can barely hit the side of a barn with a 4x scope on a precision rifle.

All this serves to make a truly intense experience, one that I find unmatched by games that even sport a clear horror theme. PUBG is sheer terror. No wonder why it holds the record for most concurrent players on Steam (3.2 million players in 2018!).

Now, about that Kentucky Fried Chicken…

In PUBG, the winner of the round – which is to say the last surviving solo player or team – is greeted with a “Winner! Winner! Chicken dinner!” message.  I have always found it amusing that this exclamation of Great Depression-era gamblers has become the victory chant for a 21st Century blood e-sport. Some things endure with the changing times.  

With that in mind, I guess it was only a matter of time until Krafton, the developer/publisher of PUBG, formed a cross-marketing partnership with the royal rooster of fast food chicken, KFC.  Hence, this announcement that, I admit, brought a smile to my lips:

This is one of those strokes of marketing genius that makes me made that it didn't occur to me first!  As a life-long gamer, I am always happy to see some of my favorite video games get exposed to a broader culture.  

I had to go see one of these in-game.  So, I jumped right in and hoped to get lucky. It took a bunch of matches, but I eventually found my way to an in-game KFC without getting killed first:

Neat! Unfortunately, as I was being stalked at the time, I didn't get to place an order and see my name come up over the counter. Maybe next time!

I really got a kick out of this cross promotion. I hope we see more of this. It's not anything new, of course (Call of Duty does it all the time), but it rarely seems to come to games that I still play.

In related news, PUBG is also having a cross promotion with Trolli:

Now through December 2023, gamers can get their hands on the collectable Trolli x PUBG packs that feature iconic PUBG characters at retailers nationwide. The collaboration features four limited-edition packs that offer fans exclusive in-game content, including four Trolli character skins featuring the unmistakable image of the neon Trolli worms. Fans can score the free Trolli character skins with every purchase and join Trolli’s growing ‘Sour Brite Squad’ that includes all players whose in-game character dons the unexpected, colorful battle-ready outfit.

You can read more here.

Lastly, as I said before, getting those screenshots required me to play a few games before I got the right map and survived the trek. I was as bad as I remembered!  But the more I played, the (slightly) better I got. I even managed to get three kills in one match against actual people and not bots! Not surprisingly, my victims were at my level or below. When you watch the clip, you can easily see all the mistakes I made. If I was playing against more advanced players, I would have been the one taking the dirt nap!