"As an ex-Hostess employee, I can corroborate Anonymouse's story (and no, I'm not a viral marketer for Little Debbie) - Epic's main offices provided for 43% of our orders nationwide, though he's got the facts severely bent.
Up until April of '09, Epic was hoarding Cherry Flavor Hostess Fruit Pies like nobody's business until a top exec in the Irving office (let's just call him 'Cheesecake Danish') started getting frantic calls from a 919 area code rambling about how the Fruit Pies were filled with 'weaksauce' and should be 'richer, better and more tasty-ass.'
The calls continued for about a week until a production officer (who we'll call 'Raspberry Toothache') reached out to PR and made the connection through Epic's official channels - poor Cliffy had been crunching late late late into the night, and in a cherry-flavored fever haze of debugging and scripting dialog for GoW3 on expired milk cartons, mistook the customer service number on the back of our treats for Mark Rein's secret 'emergency snack supply' phone line.
Apologies were made, and this is when the alliance began - a secret deal between Hostess and Epic (informally, the 'Epic Hostess Megacake Project') that would produce the doomed Frag Cakes line, flavored with a crimson carmelized toffee made to simulate the unique texture of freshly-stomped Locust tissue matter.
The cakes were a disaster, costing the company 720$ million in research and development and causing hundreds of focus group testers to swear off solid food of any kind for weeks.
I'm telling you, if you think making games is a rough business, the synthetic convenience snack treat industry will eat you alive - no pun intended."
One of the replies to the main post.
This is great.
Up until April of '09, Epic was hoarding Cherry Flavor Hostess Fruit Pies like nobody's business until a top exec in the Irving office (let's just call him 'Cheesecake Danish') started getting frantic calls from a 919 area code rambling about how the Fruit Pies were filled with 'weaksauce' and should be 'richer, better and more tasty-ass.'
The calls continued for about a week until a production officer (who we'll call 'Raspberry Toothache') reached out to PR and made the connection through Epic's official channels - poor Cliffy had been crunching late late late into the night, and in a cherry-flavored fever haze of debugging and scripting dialog for GoW3 on expired milk cartons, mistook the customer service number on the back of our treats for Mark Rein's secret 'emergency snack supply' phone line.
Apologies were made, and this is when the alliance began - a secret deal between Hostess and Epic (informally, the 'Epic Hostess Megacake Project') that would produce the doomed Frag Cakes line, flavored with a crimson carmelized toffee made to simulate the unique texture of freshly-stomped Locust tissue matter.
The cakes were a disaster, costing the company 720$ million in research and development and causing hundreds of focus group testers to swear off solid food of any kind for weeks.
I'm telling you, if you think making games is a rough business, the synthetic convenience snack treat industry will eat you alive - no pun intended."
One of the replies to the main post.
This is great.
