Kentucky Fried Chicken is known for weird publicity stunts. They had takeout boxes with phone chargers built in, buckets of chicken that included a photo printer, and even their own comic books. But now, they’ve reached a whole new level of weird. Introducing The Hard Way: A KFC Virtual Training Escape Room.
A press release from the company revealed a video for an Oculus virtual reality experience the company has created called The Hard Way: A KFC Virtual Training Escape Room . Raise your hand if you’ve played BioShock or at least know what the BioShock universe looks like. Most of you? All of you? This video for the Chicken Mastery supplemental VR experience will look very familiar. The entire exercise takes only 10 minutes and shows “players” how to cook KFC’s Original Recipe fried chicken. It takes them through the five-step process of inspecting, rinsing, breading, racking, and pressure-frying the chicken. In the end, you’ll feed some to the Colonel and the experience will come to an end.
It’s a bizarre thing to witness to say the least, probably even more so if you’re actually participating. Those that were reporting about this KFC VR news were originally thinking it might be replacing the chicken cooking training. The real life training takes 25 minutes, so this would be a faster and more cost-effective method of teaching employees how to cook. A KFC spokesperson has set the record straight however. This VR experience is just going to become a part of the existing Chicken Mastery program the company uses. KFC hopes it’ll be a fun way to keep students engaged while still educating them on what they need to know.
Either way, The Hard Way: A KFC Virtual Training Escape Room looks like a full VR experience that could release on the Oculus game store. Maybe we’ll see it released down the line for the rest of us to “enjoy.”