I Spent Three Hours Getting Colonel Sanders to Fall in Love With Me on KFC’s New Dating Video Game

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Here’s a sentence that might as well have been spat out by a random word generator outfitted exclusively for 2019: Today KFC released an anime-style dating simulator game starring a hot, silver-fox Colonel Sanders. The big surprise? It’s actually pretty good.

The game, dubbed “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator” and created by entertainment/advertising company Psyop for the fried-chicken brand, follows the player through a three-day culinary school adventure (a culinary school degree in three days… that’s how you know it’s a fantasy, am I right, folks?). As the main character, your storyline involves earning your degree, supporting your best friend, and improving your culinary chops. But more than anything else, this is a dating game, and so the ultimate objective is to bag the svelte Kentucky-fried daddy that is the Colonel, looking just as suave as KFC’s CGI Instagram influencer version of the man.

KFC is no stranger to using video games as a vehicle for promotion: past stunts include a virtual reality nightmare of an employee training program and an 8-bit Atari-style game also starring the Colonel, but never has the approach been quite so… horny. Here are the highlights you can look forward to, should you, like me, choose to spend a couple hours trying to date the Hot Colonel in a fried-chicken-branded video game:

Choose Your Own Adventure

The game unfolds in ten parts, each of which involves some crucial decisions that could spell your untimely demise or otherwise bring the narrative to a regrettable halt. Yes, the stakes in this game of culinary school attractions are so high that your character might actually die, as mine did. Many times. These are just a few of the ways I inadvertently cut short my path to culinary fame and true love:

• Going towards the light in a fried-chicken-triggered, out-of-body state of rapture
• Separating a dog from his dog biscuit
• Not keeping my libido in check and making a move too soon (repeatedly…)

Not only that, but like in any dating sim, individual choices affect the object of affection’s feelings for the player, setting up an ending in which you may earn the hunky Colonel’s heart — or just a coupon to his restaurant.

Graphics

Sunlight filtering into a bedroom, an academy courtyard swirling with cherry blossoms, a cooking arena fit for Top Chef — the game is flush with such backgrounds, which frankly wouldn’t look out of place in highbrow shoujo anime like Ouran High School Host Club. The characters, too, are appropriately well rendered, blinking and pouting in a dynamic enough way to suggest some two-dimensional humanity. Not to mention, the food design actually looks appetizing.

KFC’s menu items play a central role in the game’s storyline. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

Dialogue

The dialogue trends toward cheesy, but with enough self-awareness that many of the lines can definitely be read as ironic. See, for example, the culinary school’s deliberate mouthful of a name: “University of Cooking School: Academy for Learning.” Yeah, Shakespeare could never.

Varied gameplay

Like most Choose Your Own Adventure games, this is fairly standard click ‘n’ go. But there are a few mini challenges to switch it up, including a timed quiz (which, it turns out, you’re destined to lose no matter what) and a turn-based battle against something called a “spork monster.” It’s definitely not dynamic enough to hold a person’s attention for, say, the three hours I spent speed-clicking through every possible game for this article (not to mention my romantic future with the Colonel), but more than sufficient for the one or two playthroughs that a normal human being would undertake.

Side characters

There’s a whole host of characters present to flesh out the world building of this game: best friend Miriam, spectacles-wearing Professor Dog (a.k.a. Sprinkles), villainous Aashleigh and Van Van, small-statured boy Pop, sentient kitchen appliance Clank, the forgettable Student (yes, that’s his actual name), and, of course, the Colonel. One character gets thrown a flimsy bone of a secondary storyline — BFF Miriam has her own little love thread going on with the scant remaining eligible bachelors — while others remain a frustrating enigma. Is no one going to talk about the professor/dean/CEO talking dog??

Hot Colonel

Of course, all of these features pale in the (high-cheekboned, smooth-skinned) face of the star attraction: he of the fried-chicken empire, Colonel Harland Sanders. Although the game never strays into particularly sexual territory, there are plenty of opportunities to sensually gaze at the Colonel’s rakish smile,

Hi, there. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

perfectly trimmed goatee,

How you doin’? Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

effortless side swoop of silver hair,

One ticket to the gun show, please. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

surprisingly jacked arms,

“What a HUNK!” Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

and even a hint of chest at one point, and just sigh. (Is it just me or did someone order their chicken extra spicy?) If the goal of the game is to objectify the man who gifted the world with eleven secret herbs and spices, then mission accomplished: now, an entire generation of gamers will grow up with the cursed knowledge that anime Colonel Sanders is finger lickin’ fine.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

America is engaged in a love affair with fried chicken. In August, our insatiable appetite for fried chicken (invigorated by the Popeyes versus Chick-fil-A controversy) created a chicken sandwich shortage: People stood in nearly hour-long lines, workers couldn’t afford to take breaks, and a Texas man even pulled a gun on a Popeyes cashier. To top off the fried chicken craze, KFC’s newly released dating simulator wants us to fall in love with Colonel Sanders.

Developed by Psyop and released on September 24, the game “I Love You Colonel Sanders!” is a clear marketing stunt disguised as a fun romantic conquest. (The tagline claims that it’s a “finger lickin’ good” dating sim.) The goal is to woo a very handsome and very buff Colonel Sanders, and I — and at least 4,000 other players — couldn’t resist the challenge.

The game gives you no choice but to fall in love with Colonel Sanders. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

I’ve always been intrigued by dating sims, how the gameplay process facilitates intimacy between a person and their digital partner. They’re games that are typically crafted in the form of a visual novel guided by a series of choices: Players can create their own adventures by selecting dialogue or physical actions from a list of options as the story progresses, which prompts certain reactions and responses from the virtual love interest.

The appeal of dating sims (unlike real-life dating) is that you’re expected to fall in love and relentlessly pursue the object of your affection. You date without emotional subtext and even if you mess up, you have the comfort of the restart button that’s a click away. I’d never extensively played a dating sim before, but the more time I spent on Tinder and Hinge this year, developing a romantic connection with a virtual character sounded appealing — especially when they’re unlikely to ghost me.

KFC promoted its game alongside a whimsical, anime-like introduction to its cast of characters, most of whom are unrelated to the fast-food chain. There’s the love interest (Colonel Sanders), best friend, rival chefs, and a culinary professor that’s a talking dog. The game — and by extension the brand — received plenty of interest for its outlandish, “can you believe it” premise prior to its release. This led me to wonder: Why did KFC venture into dating sims instead of opting for a cooking simulation game like Overcooked, where players prepared dishes in a restaurant? Why did the chain want players to pursue love with its mascot rather than directly interact with its menu items?

The simple answer is that brands like KFC are tiptoeing into gameplay to attract consumers — to make them invested in a game tangentially related to what they’re trying to sell. Revamping its mascot as an animated silver fox was a strategy “to make the Colonel a part of pop culture,” the company’s chief marketing officer, Andrea Zahuemsky, told the Wall Street Journal.

Colonel Sanders has always been KFC’s “north star,” and he has different personas for different audiences. For football season, he’s portraying Rudy, the star football player in a sports movie of the same name. The animated “hot Colonel,” as he’s dubbed by fans of the game, panders to gamers, fans of Japanese culture, and anyone looking for love, Zahuemsky told me in an email.

i went and did it
i downloaded the kfc dating sim and it’s?? not that bad?? just absurd??#iloveyoucolonelsanders pic.twitter.com/2Hg60XZEBN

“Colonel Sanders was the original celebrity chef and would stop at nothing to sell his world-famous fried chicken, so we always want our activations to tie back to his real-life persona,” Zahuemsky wrote. “So it made perfect sense that, even in a dating simulator that features a younger (available) Colonel, he is focused on his world-famous Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

As Jenny Zhang wrote for Eater, KFC has used video games as a vehicle for promotion before (it released an 8-bit game called Colonel Quest in 2015), but none has been as explicitly thirsty for its mascot. So in my pursuit to better understand KFC’s brand strategy, I decided to court Colonel Sanders.

I spent two hours at my kitchen table ruminating over the dialogue choices that would make Colonel Sanders fall in love with me. I have, in game-time, three “days” to do so, since the culinary school only offers three-day semesters. Your character is an aspiring chef, and on the first day, you find yourself attracted to the Colonel, a fellow culinary student.

My character was drawn to the Colonel’s culinary expertise and winning looks. He bragged about using eleven herbs and spices to create his special fried chicken recipe, and after I pressed for more details, he divulged his special ingredient. Most of the conversation revolved around our shared passion of cooking as I tried to impress him with my culinary abilities in class. He praised my grandma’s mashed potatoes recipe and my scrumptious mac and cheese creation — both real-life KFC side dishes.

It’s impossible to play the game without constantly thinking about KFC, an undeniable success for the fast-food chain. My character was constantly overwhelmed by the sheer deliciousness of Colonel Sanders’s meals, which led me to think, am I supposed to be in love with the Colonel or the meals he serves up?

Colonel Sanders’s special fried chicken wowed the class on the first day of culinary school. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

But as entertaining and easy as the gameplay is, our love story lacked substance — a major disappointment for me, a romantically parched soul. There were scenes that should foster intimacy (I slept over at his house and woke up to a biscuit breakfast), but as I’ve learned from previous dialogue suggestions, it’s easy to fall out of favor with the Colonel. (He got mad at me for wiping sauce from his mustache. Excuse me!)

The lack of romantic substance shouldn’t be surprising, as “I Love You Colonel Sanders!” is a branded dating sim, writes Nicole Carpenter for Polygon. And while the love story isn’t satisfying, by downloading the game itself I’ve already succumbed to the overarching power of KFC.

The fried chicken chain successfully infiltrated my mind, seizing control of my hunger-weakened thoughts and influencing every single one of my in-game dialogue choices. On the first day of class, for example, our canine professor quizzed us on “culinary basics,” which turned out to be a pop quiz on KFC’s brand history. Sprinkled throughout the gameplay were hints of the brand’s values: an emphasis on simple family recipes and small-town cooking.

The culinary canine professor, whose name is Sprinkles. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

The connection between chicken sales and game downloads has yet to be established, but KFC is undoubtedly attempting to connect intimately with customers and build brand goodwill. The game sought to familiarize me with KFC’s history and the Colonel’s values: Be your best self. Make a difference. Have fun. In a short two-hour span, I became familiar with his ambitions for his future fried-chicken establishment. I found myself naturally rooting for him, as a romantic partner should. And consequently, these thoughts influenced my perception of KFC.

According to Mario Natarelli, one of the authors of Brand Intimacy: A New Paradigm in Marketing, bonds between brands and consumers are vital to a long-term business strategy. Bonds should be reciprocal and fueled by emotion, he told Forbes. A 2019 brand intimacy study by marketing agency MBLM (which Natarelli is a partner of) ranked KFC within the top 10 fast-food companies with strong brand intimacy. The rankings rely on six archetypes, from nostalgia to identity, to analyze how companies develop an emotional connection with customers. KFC’s identity, which is enmeshed with Colonel Sanders, is its strength, the study found.

“I Love You Colonel Sanders!” didn’t satiate my fried chicken-oriented romance fantasy, but it’s undeniably a creative endeavor to modernize the old Colonel Sanders and build brand recognition. Still, my short-lived flirtation with the Colonel resulted in little more than a coupon offer to his restaurant, to which my character half-heartedly responded: “Gee … thanks.” It was the first time I’d been disappointed by a virtual man rather than an IRL one.

Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

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Share All sharing options for: I Spent Three Hours Getting Colonel Sanders to Fall in Love With Me on KFC’s New Dating Video Game

Here’s a sentence that might as well have been spat out by a random word generator outfitted exclusively for 2019: Today KFC released an anime-style dating simulator game starring a hot, silver-fox Colonel Sanders. The big surprise? It’s actually pretty good.

The game, dubbed “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator” and created by entertainment/advertising company Psyop for the fried-chicken brand, follows the player through a three-day culinary school adventure (a culinary school degree in three days… that’s how you know it’s a fantasy, am I right, folks?). As the main character, your storyline involves earning your degree, supporting your best friend, and improving your culinary chops. But more than anything else, this is a dating game, and so the ultimate objective is to bag the svelte Kentucky-fried daddy that is the Colonel, looking just as suave as KFC’s CGI Instagram influencer version of the man.

KFC is no stranger to using video games as a vehicle for promotion: past stunts include a virtual reality nightmare of an employee training program and an 8-bit Atari-style game also starring the Colonel, but never has the approach been quite so… horny. Here are the highlights you can look forward to, should you, like me, choose to spend a couple hours trying to date the Hot Colonel in a fried-chicken-branded video game:

Choose Your Own Adventure

The game unfolds in ten parts, each of which involves some crucial decisions that could spell your untimely demise or otherwise bring the narrative to a regrettable halt. Yes, the stakes in this game of culinary school attractions are so high that your character might actually die, as mine did. Many times. These are just a few of the ways I inadvertently cut short my path to culinary fame and true love:

• Going towards the light in a fried-chicken-triggered, out-of-body state of rapture
• Separating a dog from his dog biscuit
• Not keeping my libido in check and making a move too soon (repeatedly…)

Not only that, but like in any dating sim, individual choices affect the object of affection’s feelings for the player, setting up an ending in which you may earn the hunky Colonel’s heart — or just a coupon to his restaurant.

Graphics

Sunlight filtering into a bedroom, an academy courtyard swirling with cherry blossoms, a cooking arena fit for Top Chef — the game is flush with such backgrounds, which frankly wouldn’t look out of place in highbrow shoujo anime like Ouran High School Host Club. The characters, too, are appropriately well rendered, blinking and pouting in a dynamic enough way to suggest some two-dimensional humanity. Not to mention, the food design actually looks appetizing.

KFC’s menu items play a central role in the game’s storyline. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

Dialogue

The dialogue trends toward cheesy, but with enough self-awareness that many of the lines can definitely be read as ironic. See, for example, the culinary school’s deliberate mouthful of a name: “University of Cooking School: Academy for Learning.” Yeah, Shakespeare could never.

Varied gameplay

Like most Choose Your Own Adventure games, this is fairly standard click ‘n’ go. But there are a few mini challenges to switch it up, including a timed quiz (which, it turns out, you’re destined to lose no matter what) and a turn-based battle against something called a “spork monster.” It’s definitely not dynamic enough to hold a person’s attention for, say, the three hours I spent speed-clicking through every possible game for this article (not to mention my romantic future with the Colonel), but more than sufficient for the one or two playthroughs that a normal human being would undertake.

Side characters

There’s a whole host of characters present to flesh out the world building of this game: best friend Miriam, spectacles-wearing Professor Dog (a.k.a. Sprinkles), villainous Aashleigh and Van Van, small-statured boy Pop, sentient kitchen appliance Clank, the forgettable Student (yes, that’s his actual name), and, of course, the Colonel. One character gets thrown a flimsy bone of a secondary storyline — BFF Miriam has her own little love thread going on with the scant remaining eligible bachelors — while others remain a frustrating enigma. Is no one going to talk about the professor/dean/CEO talking dog??

Hot Colonel

Of course, all of these features pale in the (high-cheekboned, smooth-skinned) face of the star attraction: he of the fried-chicken empire, Colonel Harland Sanders. Although the game never strays into particularly sexual territory, there are plenty of opportunities to sensually gaze at the Colonel’s rakish smile,

Hi, there. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

perfectly trimmed goatee,

How you doin’? Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

effortless side swoop of silver hair,

One ticket to the gun show, please. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

surprisingly jacked arms,

“What a HUNK!” Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

and even a hint of chest at one point, and just sigh. (Is it just me or did someone order their chicken extra spicy?) If the goal of the game is to objectify the man who gifted the world with eleven secret herbs and spices, then mission accomplished: now, an entire generation of gamers will grow up with the cursed knowledge that anime Colonel Sanders is finger lickin’ fine.

Sign up for the newsletter Eater.com

The freshest news from the food world every day

Hot Colonel

Though KFC’s marketing has turned back to the Colonel as the company’s mascot, it’s distanced himself from actual man. The Colonel is now quirky, or cool, and maybe hot, but it’s not the man who sued the company for $122 million and said its gravy was unfit for his dogs. Not to mention, the Colonel had some problematic relationships with women; during a 1999 episode of This American Life, Colonel Sanders’ biographer John Ed Pearce said a woman from Kentucky’s Chamber of Commerce told him that “every time Harland came in, why, she had to beat his hands off of her.”

And so, hot Colonel Sanders is wiped of much of that context, aside from the white suit and glasses, and slapped into the fantasy world of I Love You, Colonel Sanders!

The dating simulator was spotted on Steam in early September and greeted with a mixture of confusion, intrigue, anger, and laughter — a reaction that’s nearly identical any time KFC launches one of its millennial marketing stunts.

In April 2019, hot Colonel performed Chippendale’s style dances in a video you were meant to send to your mom. In 2017, the Colonel starred in a romance novel called “Tender Wings of Desire,” bizarrely enough, also for Mother’s Day. That year, KFC also released a horror virtual reality training video game called The Hard Way. (Ironic, too, that most of KFC’s stunts are riffing on things typically marketed toward women, like romance novels and social media influencers, and often devalued because of it.)

Developed by creative agency Psyop, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is less of a game and more of a marketing stunt, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Colonel Sanders dating simulator was created to grab attention and not necessarily hold it. It’s all part of a larger brand identity, and just the news cycle alone — highlighting the bizarre notion of a Colonel Sanders dating sim — created by the announcement is enough to satiate the marketing beast. And that’s exactly what it did. Plenty of us are talking about whether or not we want to bone KFC’s mascot. Though some were critical of I Love You, Colonel Sanders!, much of the cycle was like a laugh and a head pat: There goes the brands again! KFC didn’t have to release a game at all; the announcement itself did enough of the work.

But KFC did release the game after all, a free experience that took me just over an hour to complete. (On the Steam page, KFC said it had “multiple hours of play-through.”) The game begins by introducing the player-character, a new student at a culinary school called University of Cooking School, which itself is led by a corgi called Professor Dog. (Casually, Professor Dog goes by Sprinkles.) Other students include your best friend Miriam, two very glam bullies, a student pretending to be a ghost, a confused child, a piece of kitchen equipment, and, of course, a young Colonel Sanders developing his fried chicken recipe. (The real Colonel Sanders did not actually go to culinary school, a KFC spokesperson told Slate.)

Professor Dog puts his students through three days of culinary training before graduation in a visual novel–style story with vaguely playable mini-games, the most interactive of which has you take on an extremely moldy spork in a turn-based fight. There’s so little substance in all of it that it hardly feels like a game or interactive experience at all.

Throughout it all, you, as the player-character, are attempting to romance Colonel Sanders. The only real way to earn the Colonel’s heart in I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is by impressing him with your cooking prowess and knowledge, and you’re competing with one of the glam bullies to win his love. Ironically, like the Colonel Sanders dating sim, she’s all style over substance, often creating food that is literally too beautiful to eat; she won’t let a Professor Dog taste test her final meal. And so it’s easy to woo Colonel Sanders with your mashed potatoes and mac-and-cheese. (Not so coincidentally, KFC recently launched a product that’s chicken tenders mixed with mac-and-cheese.)

If you fail to win his love during the game, you’ll get a prompt to reverse any wrong answers you chose and right your mistakes. On my play-through, I won Colonel Sanders’ heart, but he didn’t want me to become his business partner. Bummer.

On the surface, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is just a bland — 11 herbs and spices, huh? — marketing stunt with no substance, something plenty probably expected here. But there’s something more insidious to the game in its lack of substance and care for the genre.

This story is part of a group of stories called

America is engaged in a love affair with fried chicken. In August, our insatiable appetite for fried chicken (invigorated by the Popeyes versus Chick-fil-A controversy) created a chicken sandwich shortage: People stood in nearly hour-long lines, workers couldn’t afford to take breaks, and a Texas man even pulled a gun on a Popeyes cashier. To top off the fried chicken craze, KFC’s newly released dating simulator wants us to fall in love with Colonel Sanders.

Developed by Psyop and released on September 24, the game “I Love You Colonel Sanders!” is a clear marketing stunt disguised as a fun romantic conquest. (The tagline claims that it’s a “finger lickin’ good” dating sim.) The goal is to woo a very handsome and very buff Colonel Sanders, and I — and at least 4,000 other players — couldn’t resist the challenge.

The game gives you no choice but to fall in love with Colonel Sanders. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

I’ve always been intrigued by dating sims, how the gameplay process facilitates intimacy between a person and their digital partner. They’re games that are typically crafted in the form of a visual novel guided by a series of choices: Players can create their own adventures by selecting dialogue or physical actions from a list of options as the story progresses, which prompts certain reactions and responses from the virtual love interest.

The appeal of dating sims (unlike real-life dating) is that you’re expected to fall in love and relentlessly pursue the object of your affection. You date without emotional subtext and even if you mess up, you have the comfort of the restart button that’s a click away. I’d never extensively played a dating sim before, but the more time I spent on Tinder and Hinge this year, developing a romantic connection with a virtual character sounded appealing — especially when they’re unlikely to ghost me.

KFC promoted its game alongside a whimsical, anime-like introduction to its cast of characters, most of whom are unrelated to the fast-food chain. There’s the love interest (Colonel Sanders), best friend, rival chefs, and a culinary professor that’s a talking dog. The game — and by extension the brand — received plenty of interest for its outlandish, “can you believe it” premise prior to its release. This led me to wonder: Why did KFC venture into dating sims instead of opting for a cooking simulation game like Overcooked, where players prepared dishes in a restaurant? Why did the chain want players to pursue love with its mascot rather than directly interact with its menu items?

The simple answer is that brands like KFC are tiptoeing into gameplay to attract consumers — to make them invested in a game tangentially related to what they’re trying to sell. Revamping its mascot as an animated silver fox was a strategy “to make the Colonel a part of pop culture,” the company’s chief marketing officer, Andrea Zahuemsky, told the Wall Street Journal.

Colonel Sanders has always been KFC’s “north star,” and he has different personas for different audiences. For football season, he’s portraying Rudy, the star football player in a sports movie of the same name. The animated “hot Colonel,” as he’s dubbed by fans of the game, panders to gamers, fans of Japanese culture, and anyone looking for love, Zahuemsky told me in an email.

i went and did it
i downloaded the kfc dating sim and it’s?? not that bad?? just absurd??#iloveyoucolonelsanders pic.twitter.com/2Hg60XZEBN

“Colonel Sanders was the original celebrity chef and would stop at nothing to sell his world-famous fried chicken, so we always want our activations to tie back to his real-life persona,” Zahuemsky wrote. “So it made perfect sense that, even in a dating simulator that features a younger (available) Colonel, he is focused on his world-famous Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

As Jenny Zhang wrote for Eater, KFC has used video games as a vehicle for promotion before (it released an 8-bit game called Colonel Quest in 2015), but none has been as explicitly thirsty for its mascot. So in my pursuit to better understand KFC’s brand strategy, I decided to court Colonel Sanders.

I spent two hours at my kitchen table ruminating over the dialogue choices that would make Colonel Sanders fall in love with me. I have, in game-time, three “days” to do so, since the culinary school only offers three-day semesters. Your character is an aspiring chef, and on the first day, you find yourself attracted to the Colonel, a fellow culinary student.

My character was drawn to the Colonel’s culinary expertise and winning looks. He bragged about using eleven herbs and spices to create his special fried chicken recipe, and after I pressed for more details, he divulged his special ingredient. Most of the conversation revolved around our shared passion of cooking as I tried to impress him with my culinary abilities in class. He praised my grandma’s mashed potatoes recipe and my scrumptious mac and cheese creation — both real-life KFC side dishes.

It’s impossible to play the game without constantly thinking about KFC, an undeniable success for the fast-food chain. My character was constantly overwhelmed by the sheer deliciousness of Colonel Sanders’s meals, which led me to think, am I supposed to be in love with the Colonel or the meals he serves up?

Colonel Sanders’s special fried chicken wowed the class on the first day of culinary school. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

But as entertaining and easy as the gameplay is, our love story lacked substance — a major disappointment for me, a romantically parched soul. There were scenes that should foster intimacy (I slept over at his house and woke up to a biscuit breakfast), but as I’ve learned from previous dialogue suggestions, it’s easy to fall out of favor with the Colonel. (He got mad at me for wiping sauce from his mustache. Excuse me!)

The lack of romantic substance shouldn’t be surprising, as “I Love You Colonel Sanders!” is a branded dating sim, writes Nicole Carpenter for Polygon. And while the love story isn’t satisfying, by downloading the game itself I’ve already succumbed to the overarching power of KFC.

The fried chicken chain successfully infiltrated my mind, seizing control of my hunger-weakened thoughts and influencing every single one of my in-game dialogue choices. On the first day of class, for example, our canine professor quizzed us on “culinary basics,” which turned out to be a pop quiz on KFC’s brand history. Sprinkled throughout the gameplay were hints of the brand’s values: an emphasis on simple family recipes and small-town cooking.

The culinary canine professor, whose name is Sprinkles. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

The connection between chicken sales and game downloads has yet to be established, but KFC is undoubtedly attempting to connect intimately with customers and build brand goodwill. The game sought to familiarize me with KFC’s history and the Colonel’s values: Be your best self. Make a difference. Have fun. In a short two-hour span, I became familiar with his ambitions for his future fried-chicken establishment. I found myself naturally rooting for him, as a romantic partner should. And consequently, these thoughts influenced my perception of KFC.

According to Mario Natarelli, one of the authors of Brand Intimacy: A New Paradigm in Marketing, bonds between brands and consumers are vital to a long-term business strategy. Bonds should be reciprocal and fueled by emotion, he told Forbes. A 2019 brand intimacy study by marketing agency MBLM (which Natarelli is a partner of) ranked KFC within the top 10 fast-food companies with strong brand intimacy. The rankings rely on six archetypes, from nostalgia to identity, to analyze how companies develop an emotional connection with customers. KFC’s identity, which is enmeshed with Colonel Sanders, is its strength, the study found.

“I Love You Colonel Sanders!” didn’t satiate my fried chicken-oriented romance fantasy, but it’s undeniably a creative endeavor to modernize the old Colonel Sanders and build brand recognition. Still, my short-lived flirtation with the Colonel resulted in little more than a coupon offer to his restaurant, to which my character half-heartedly responded: “Gee … thanks.” It was the first time I’d been disappointed by a virtual man rather than an IRL one.

Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

Hot Colonel

Though KFC’s marketing has turned back to the Colonel as the company’s mascot, it’s distanced himself from actual man. The Colonel is now quirky, or cool, and maybe hot, but it’s not the man who sued the company for $122 million and said its gravy was unfit for his dogs. Not to mention, the Colonel had some problematic relationships with women; during a 1999 episode of This American Life, Colonel Sanders’ biographer John Ed Pearce said a woman from Kentucky’s Chamber of Commerce told him that “every time Harland came in, why, she had to beat his hands off of her.”

And so, hot Colonel Sanders is wiped of much of that context, aside from the white suit and glasses, and slapped into the fantasy world of I Love You, Colonel Sanders!

The dating simulator was spotted on Steam in early September and greeted with a mixture of confusion, intrigue, anger, and laughter — a reaction that’s nearly identical any time KFC launches one of its millennial marketing stunts.

In April 2019, hot Colonel performed Chippendale’s style dances in a video you were meant to send to your mom. In 2017, the Colonel starred in a romance novel called “Tender Wings of Desire,” bizarrely enough, also for Mother’s Day. That year, KFC also released a horror virtual reality training video game called The Hard Way. (Ironic, too, that most of KFC’s stunts are riffing on things typically marketed toward women, like romance novels and social media influencers, and often devalued because of it.)

Developed by creative agency Psyop, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is less of a game and more of a marketing stunt, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Colonel Sanders dating simulator was created to grab attention and not necessarily hold it. It’s all part of a larger brand identity, and just the news cycle alone — highlighting the bizarre notion of a Colonel Sanders dating sim — created by the announcement is enough to satiate the marketing beast. And that’s exactly what it did. Plenty of us are talking about whether or not we want to bone KFC’s mascot. Though some were critical of I Love You, Colonel Sanders!, much of the cycle was like a laugh and a head pat: There goes the brands again! KFC didn’t have to release a game at all; the announcement itself did enough of the work.

But KFC did release the game after all, a free experience that took me just over an hour to complete. (On the Steam page, KFC said it had “multiple hours of play-through.”) The game begins by introducing the player-character, a new student at a culinary school called University of Cooking School, which itself is led by a corgi called Professor Dog. (Casually, Professor Dog goes by Sprinkles.) Other students include your best friend Miriam, two very glam bullies, a student pretending to be a ghost, a confused child, a piece of kitchen equipment, and, of course, a young Colonel Sanders developing his fried chicken recipe. (The real Colonel Sanders did not actually go to culinary school, a KFC spokesperson told Slate.)

Professor Dog puts his students through three days of culinary training before graduation in a visual novel–style story with vaguely playable mini-games, the most interactive of which has you take on an extremely moldy spork in a turn-based fight. There’s so little substance in all of it that it hardly feels like a game or interactive experience at all.

Throughout it all, you, as the player-character, are attempting to romance Colonel Sanders. The only real way to earn the Colonel’s heart in I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is by impressing him with your cooking prowess and knowledge, and you’re competing with one of the glam bullies to win his love. Ironically, like the Colonel Sanders dating sim, she’s all style over substance, often creating food that is literally too beautiful to eat; she won’t let a Professor Dog taste test her final meal. And so it’s easy to woo Colonel Sanders with your mashed potatoes and mac-and-cheese. (Not so coincidentally, KFC recently launched a product that’s chicken tenders mixed with mac-and-cheese.)

If you fail to win his love during the game, you’ll get a prompt to reverse any wrong answers you chose and right your mistakes. On my play-through, I won Colonel Sanders’ heart, but he didn’t want me to become his business partner. Bummer.

On the surface, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is just a bland — 11 herbs and spices, huh? — marketing stunt with no substance, something plenty probably expected here. But there’s something more insidious to the game in its lack of substance and care for the genre.

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Here’s a sentence that might as well have been spat out by a random word generator outfitted exclusively for 2019: Today KFC released an anime-style dating simulator game starring a hot, silver-fox Colonel Sanders. The big surprise? It’s actually pretty good.

The game, dubbed “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator” and created by entertainment/advertising company Psyop for the fried-chicken brand, follows the player through a three-day culinary school adventure (a culinary school degree in three days… that’s how you know it’s a fantasy, am I right, folks?). As the main character, your storyline involves earning your degree, supporting your best friend, and improving your culinary chops. But more than anything else, this is a dating game, and so the ultimate objective is to bag the svelte Kentucky-fried daddy that is the Colonel, looking just as suave as KFC’s CGI Instagram influencer version of the man.

KFC is no stranger to using video games as a vehicle for promotion: past stunts include a virtual reality nightmare of an employee training program and an 8-bit Atari-style game also starring the Colonel, but never has the approach been quite so… horny. Here are the highlights you can look forward to, should you, like me, choose to spend a couple hours trying to date the Hot Colonel in a fried-chicken-branded video game:

Choose Your Own Adventure

The game unfolds in ten parts, each of which involves some crucial decisions that could spell your untimely demise or otherwise bring the narrative to a regrettable halt. Yes, the stakes in this game of culinary school attractions are so high that your character might actually die, as mine did. Many times. These are just a few of the ways I inadvertently cut short my path to culinary fame and true love:

• Going towards the light in a fried-chicken-triggered, out-of-body state of rapture
• Separating a dog from his dog biscuit
• Not keeping my libido in check and making a move too soon (repeatedly…)

Not only that, but like in any dating sim, individual choices affect the object of affection’s feelings for the player, setting up an ending in which you may earn the hunky Colonel’s heart — or just a coupon to his restaurant.

Graphics

Sunlight filtering into a bedroom, an academy courtyard swirling with cherry blossoms, a cooking arena fit for Top Chef — the game is flush with such backgrounds, which frankly wouldn’t look out of place in highbrow shoujo anime like Ouran High School Host Club. The characters, too, are appropriately well rendered, blinking and pouting in a dynamic enough way to suggest some two-dimensional humanity. Not to mention, the food design actually looks appetizing.

KFC’s menu items play a central role in the game’s storyline. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

Dialogue

The dialogue trends toward cheesy, but with enough self-awareness that many of the lines can definitely be read as ironic. See, for example, the culinary school’s deliberate mouthful of a name: “University of Cooking School: Academy for Learning.” Yeah, Shakespeare could never.

Varied gameplay

Like most Choose Your Own Adventure games, this is fairly standard click ‘n’ go. But there are a few mini challenges to switch it up, including a timed quiz (which, it turns out, you’re destined to lose no matter what) and a turn-based battle against something called a “spork monster.” It’s definitely not dynamic enough to hold a person’s attention for, say, the three hours I spent speed-clicking through every possible game for this article (not to mention my romantic future with the Colonel), but more than sufficient for the one or two playthroughs that a normal human being would undertake.

Side characters

There’s a whole host of characters present to flesh out the world building of this game: best friend Miriam, spectacles-wearing Professor Dog (a.k.a. Sprinkles), villainous Aashleigh and Van Van, small-statured boy Pop, sentient kitchen appliance Clank, the forgettable Student (yes, that’s his actual name), and, of course, the Colonel. One character gets thrown a flimsy bone of a secondary storyline — BFF Miriam has her own little love thread going on with the scant remaining eligible bachelors — while others remain a frustrating enigma. Is no one going to talk about the professor/dean/CEO talking dog??

Hot Colonel

Of course, all of these features pale in the (high-cheekboned, smooth-skinned) face of the star attraction: he of the fried-chicken empire, Colonel Harland Sanders. Although the game never strays into particularly sexual territory, there are plenty of opportunities to sensually gaze at the Colonel’s rakish smile,

Hi, there. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

perfectly trimmed goatee,

How you doin’? Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

effortless side swoop of silver hair,

One ticket to the gun show, please. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

surprisingly jacked arms,

“What a HUNK!” Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

and even a hint of chest at one point, and just sigh. (Is it just me or did someone order their chicken extra spicy?) If the goal of the game is to objectify the man who gifted the world with eleven secret herbs and spices, then mission accomplished: now, an entire generation of gamers will grow up with the cursed knowledge that anime Colonel Sanders is finger lickin’ fine.

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America is engaged in a love affair with fried chicken. In August, our insatiable appetite for fried chicken (invigorated by the Popeyes versus Chick-fil-A controversy) created a chicken sandwich shortage: People stood in nearly hour-long lines, workers couldn’t afford to take breaks, and a Texas man even pulled a gun on a Popeyes cashier. To top off the fried chicken craze, KFC’s newly released dating simulator wants us to fall in love with Colonel Sanders.

Developed by Psyop and released on September 24, the game “I Love You Colonel Sanders!” is a clear marketing stunt disguised as a fun romantic conquest. (The tagline claims that it’s a “finger lickin’ good” dating sim.) The goal is to woo a very handsome and very buff Colonel Sanders, and I — and at least 4,000 other players — couldn’t resist the challenge.

The game gives you no choice but to fall in love with Colonel Sanders. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

I’ve always been intrigued by dating sims, how the gameplay process facilitates intimacy between a person and their digital partner. They’re games that are typically crafted in the form of a visual novel guided by a series of choices: Players can create their own adventures by selecting dialogue or physical actions from a list of options as the story progresses, which prompts certain reactions and responses from the virtual love interest.

The appeal of dating sims (unlike real-life dating) is that you’re expected to fall in love and relentlessly pursue the object of your affection. You date without emotional subtext and even if you mess up, you have the comfort of the restart button that’s a click away. I’d never extensively played a dating sim before, but the more time I spent on Tinder and Hinge this year, developing a romantic connection with a virtual character sounded appealing — especially when they’re unlikely to ghost me.

KFC promoted its game alongside a whimsical, anime-like introduction to its cast of characters, most of whom are unrelated to the fast-food chain. There’s the love interest (Colonel Sanders), best friend, rival chefs, and a culinary professor that’s a talking dog. The game — and by extension the brand — received plenty of interest for its outlandish, “can you believe it” premise prior to its release. This led me to wonder: Why did KFC venture into dating sims instead of opting for a cooking simulation game like Overcooked, where players prepared dishes in a restaurant? Why did the chain want players to pursue love with its mascot rather than directly interact with its menu items?

The simple answer is that brands like KFC are tiptoeing into gameplay to attract consumers — to make them invested in a game tangentially related to what they’re trying to sell. Revamping its mascot as an animated silver fox was a strategy “to make the Colonel a part of pop culture,” the company’s chief marketing officer, Andrea Zahuemsky, told the Wall Street Journal.

Colonel Sanders has always been KFC’s “north star,” and he has different personas for different audiences. For football season, he’s portraying Rudy, the star football player in a sports movie of the same name. The animated “hot Colonel,” as he’s dubbed by fans of the game, panders to gamers, fans of Japanese culture, and anyone looking for love, Zahuemsky told me in an email.

i went and did it
i downloaded the kfc dating sim and it’s?? not that bad?? just absurd??#iloveyoucolonelsanders pic.twitter.com/2Hg60XZEBN

“Colonel Sanders was the original celebrity chef and would stop at nothing to sell his world-famous fried chicken, so we always want our activations to tie back to his real-life persona,” Zahuemsky wrote. “So it made perfect sense that, even in a dating simulator that features a younger (available) Colonel, he is focused on his world-famous Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

As Jenny Zhang wrote for Eater, KFC has used video games as a vehicle for promotion before (it released an 8-bit game called Colonel Quest in 2015), but none has been as explicitly thirsty for its mascot. So in my pursuit to better understand KFC’s brand strategy, I decided to court Colonel Sanders.

I spent two hours at my kitchen table ruminating over the dialogue choices that would make Colonel Sanders fall in love with me. I have, in game-time, three “days” to do so, since the culinary school only offers three-day semesters. Your character is an aspiring chef, and on the first day, you find yourself attracted to the Colonel, a fellow culinary student.

My character was drawn to the Colonel’s culinary expertise and winning looks. He bragged about using eleven herbs and spices to create his special fried chicken recipe, and after I pressed for more details, he divulged his special ingredient. Most of the conversation revolved around our shared passion of cooking as I tried to impress him with my culinary abilities in class. He praised my grandma’s mashed potatoes recipe and my scrumptious mac and cheese creation — both real-life KFC side dishes.

It’s impossible to play the game without constantly thinking about KFC, an undeniable success for the fast-food chain. My character was constantly overwhelmed by the sheer deliciousness of Colonel Sanders’s meals, which led me to think, am I supposed to be in love with the Colonel or the meals he serves up?

Colonel Sanders’s special fried chicken wowed the class on the first day of culinary school. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

But as entertaining and easy as the gameplay is, our love story lacked substance — a major disappointment for me, a romantically parched soul. There were scenes that should foster intimacy (I slept over at his house and woke up to a biscuit breakfast), but as I’ve learned from previous dialogue suggestions, it’s easy to fall out of favor with the Colonel. (He got mad at me for wiping sauce from his mustache. Excuse me!)

The lack of romantic substance shouldn’t be surprising, as “I Love You Colonel Sanders!” is a branded dating sim, writes Nicole Carpenter for Polygon. And while the love story isn’t satisfying, by downloading the game itself I’ve already succumbed to the overarching power of KFC.

The fried chicken chain successfully infiltrated my mind, seizing control of my hunger-weakened thoughts and influencing every single one of my in-game dialogue choices. On the first day of class, for example, our canine professor quizzed us on “culinary basics,” which turned out to be a pop quiz on KFC’s brand history. Sprinkled throughout the gameplay were hints of the brand’s values: an emphasis on simple family recipes and small-town cooking.

The culinary canine professor, whose name is Sprinkles. Screenshot of “I Love You Colonel Sanders!”

The connection between chicken sales and game downloads has yet to be established, but KFC is undoubtedly attempting to connect intimately with customers and build brand goodwill. The game sought to familiarize me with KFC’s history and the Colonel’s values: Be your best self. Make a difference. Have fun. In a short two-hour span, I became familiar with his ambitions for his future fried-chicken establishment. I found myself naturally rooting for him, as a romantic partner should. And consequently, these thoughts influenced my perception of KFC.

According to Mario Natarelli, one of the authors of Brand Intimacy: A New Paradigm in Marketing, bonds between brands and consumers are vital to a long-term business strategy. Bonds should be reciprocal and fueled by emotion, he told Forbes. A 2019 brand intimacy study by marketing agency MBLM (which Natarelli is a partner of) ranked KFC within the top 10 fast-food companies with strong brand intimacy. The rankings rely on six archetypes, from nostalgia to identity, to analyze how companies develop an emotional connection with customers. KFC’s identity, which is enmeshed with Colonel Sanders, is its strength, the study found.

“I Love You Colonel Sanders!” didn’t satiate my fried chicken-oriented romance fantasy, but it’s undeniably a creative endeavor to modernize the old Colonel Sanders and build brand recognition. Still, my short-lived flirtation with the Colonel resulted in little more than a coupon offer to his restaurant, to which my character half-heartedly responded: “Gee … thanks.” It was the first time I’d been disappointed by a virtual man rather than an IRL one.

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Share All sharing options for: I Spent Three Hours Getting Colonel Sanders to Fall in Love With Me on KFC’s New Dating Video Game

Here’s a sentence that might as well have been spat out by a random word generator outfitted exclusively for 2019: Today KFC released an anime-style dating simulator game starring a hot, silver-fox Colonel Sanders. The big surprise? It’s actually pretty good.

The game, dubbed “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator” and created by entertainment/advertising company Psyop for the fried-chicken brand, follows the player through a three-day culinary school adventure (a culinary school degree in three days… that’s how you know it’s a fantasy, am I right, folks?). As the main character, your storyline involves earning your degree, supporting your best friend, and improving your culinary chops. But more than anything else, this is a dating game, and so the ultimate objective is to bag the svelte Kentucky-fried daddy that is the Colonel, looking just as suave as KFC’s CGI Instagram influencer version of the man.

KFC is no stranger to using video games as a vehicle for promotion: past stunts include a virtual reality nightmare of an employee training program and an 8-bit Atari-style game also starring the Colonel, but never has the approach been quite so… horny. Here are the highlights you can look forward to, should you, like me, choose to spend a couple hours trying to date the Hot Colonel in a fried-chicken-branded video game:

Choose Your Own Adventure

The game unfolds in ten parts, each of which involves some crucial decisions that could spell your untimely demise or otherwise bring the narrative to a regrettable halt. Yes, the stakes in this game of culinary school attractions are so high that your character might actually die, as mine did. Many times. These are just a few of the ways I inadvertently cut short my path to culinary fame and true love:

• Going towards the light in a fried-chicken-triggered, out-of-body state of rapture
• Separating a dog from his dog biscuit
• Not keeping my libido in check and making a move too soon (repeatedly…)

Not only that, but like in any dating sim, individual choices affect the object of affection’s feelings for the player, setting up an ending in which you may earn the hunky Colonel’s heart — or just a coupon to his restaurant.

Graphics

Sunlight filtering into a bedroom, an academy courtyard swirling with cherry blossoms, a cooking arena fit for Top Chef — the game is flush with such backgrounds, which frankly wouldn’t look out of place in highbrow shoujo anime like Ouran High School Host Club. The characters, too, are appropriately well rendered, blinking and pouting in a dynamic enough way to suggest some two-dimensional humanity. Not to mention, the food design actually looks appetizing.

KFC’s menu items play a central role in the game’s storyline. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

Dialogue

The dialogue trends toward cheesy, but with enough self-awareness that many of the lines can definitely be read as ironic. See, for example, the culinary school’s deliberate mouthful of a name: “University of Cooking School: Academy for Learning.” Yeah, Shakespeare could never.

Varied gameplay

Like most Choose Your Own Adventure games, this is fairly standard click ‘n’ go. But there are a few mini challenges to switch it up, including a timed quiz (which, it turns out, you’re destined to lose no matter what) and a turn-based battle against something called a “spork monster.” It’s definitely not dynamic enough to hold a person’s attention for, say, the three hours I spent speed-clicking through every possible game for this article (not to mention my romantic future with the Colonel), but more than sufficient for the one or two playthroughs that a normal human being would undertake.

Side characters

There’s a whole host of characters present to flesh out the world building of this game: best friend Miriam, spectacles-wearing Professor Dog (a.k.a. Sprinkles), villainous Aashleigh and Van Van, small-statured boy Pop, sentient kitchen appliance Clank, the forgettable Student (yes, that’s his actual name), and, of course, the Colonel. One character gets thrown a flimsy bone of a secondary storyline — BFF Miriam has her own little love thread going on with the scant remaining eligible bachelors — while others remain a frustrating enigma. Is no one going to talk about the professor/dean/CEO talking dog??

Hot Colonel

Of course, all of these features pale in the (high-cheekboned, smooth-skinned) face of the star attraction: he of the fried-chicken empire, Colonel Harland Sanders. Although the game never strays into particularly sexual territory, there are plenty of opportunities to sensually gaze at the Colonel’s rakish smile,

Hi, there. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

perfectly trimmed goatee,

How you doin’? Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

effortless side swoop of silver hair,

One ticket to the gun show, please. Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

surprisingly jacked arms,

“What a HUNK!” Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

and even a hint of chest at one point, and just sigh. (Is it just me or did someone order their chicken extra spicy?) If the goal of the game is to objectify the man who gifted the world with eleven secret herbs and spices, then mission accomplished: now, an entire generation of gamers will grow up with the cursed knowledge that anime Colonel Sanders is finger lickin’ fine.

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