What do The Legend of Zelda and Fried chicken have in common? One might say that not too much at first glance.

But when the new game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was launched (selling more than 10 million copies in just 3 days), we found out.

Thanks to social listening, we discovered that players were going crazy about one of the NPC characters in game looking a lot like Colonel Sanders (KFC's founder) and also, for the first time in the Zelda series, people could cook fried chicken in the game.

Two incredible opportunities that we couldn't ignore. We needed to match the game's universe with our objectives: drive brand difference by talking about KFC's unique recipe, attract new consumers to the brand, and drive product trial.

Using only the elements already present in the game we connected Kentucky to Hyrule, turning the game's cooking mechanic into a side quest inside the game.

We challenged Zelda players with a speedrun mission that required people to visit the Colonel Lookalike, gather 11 different herbs and spices in their inventory, and cooking fried chicken as fast as they could to make their own version of KFC's original recipe and upload the video of their run.

And also, for every video they shared through X (formerly Twitter) and Twitch that met the objectives of our mission, we sent them back a unique code to try the original recipe in real life.

That's how The Recipe Run was born. A competition that had gamers collecting 11 herbs and spices, cooking fried chicken and sharing the videos of the adventure in exchange for promotional codes.

From the day of its launch, despite being a single-player game, the social component of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom took center stage: thousands of players shared hours and hours of clips from their gameplays while exploring all the possibilities of the game's crafting system, which allows everything from building gadgets to cooking (a key mechanic for obtaining in game bonuses).

The game already amassed a huge audience, and we tapped into it naturally. Instead of trying to hack, alter or modify the game, we gave players more of what they were already doing:

A fun to play, competitive speedrun challenge (a huge trend among gamers that consists on completing objectives as fast as they can and share it) that every player could experience.

A branded experience that had players interacting with KFC's original recipe, but above all, an entertaining experience that they were willing to share.

We launched the SpeedRun challenge through our own social media channels with a video that explained the mission and the rules to participate.

For every recipe clip received, we sent back a unique promotional code to try the original recipe in real life.

But we went even further. In collaboration with SRE (Spanish speedrun association), we created an official competition, where participants uploaded their best runs to www.thereciperun.com where the quickest to win a 11.000€ prize.

What was originally a local competition, quickly became so popular that it went global, with players from all over the world competing to collect 11 herbs and spices and cooking fried chicken in game as fast as they could, playing with KFC's recipe while making the best campaign we could have ever imagined for us with their user generated content.

All with no mods, no custom servers, no hacks and no problems with Nintendo!

The side quest became bigger than we imagined, with players from 17 different countries participating in the SpeedRun contest. The Recipe Run became so popular, that the Global SpeedRun Association decided to play it live in PACE, the world's biggest SpeedRun event, turning our branded challenge into pure entertainment, while we got gamers to do the campaign for us.

People shared thousands of clips, with over 105 hours of content talking about about fried chicken recipes in the game.

The local promotion brought people to 199 restaurants across Spain (more than 2/3 of our restaurants), bringing +75% of new consumers to our brand, reaching our main goal of getting people to try KFC for the first time.

And it wasn't just the gamers that were impacted. 436 media outlets shared the news, with more that 481million combined audience and generating 5.4 million € in earned media.