“And I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw…”
—Revelations 6:1-2
In the beginning (2022), Taco Bell held a contest. Two lovebirds would have the chance at winning the “uniquely Taco Bell experience” of being the first people married at a Taco Bell in the metaverse. A lucky California couple named Sheel and Amruta won, and in February 2023, they got hitched in paradise. I was there.
The wedding was flashy, funny, and genuinely touching in its own way. It was also the most surreal experience of my life. Their holy matrimony was the perfect illustration of what the metaverse really is—and what it feels like to be alive at this moment in history as the world wobbles on its axis and we all wonder what can possibly come next.
The Taco Bell wedding was a paradox. For starters, it wasn’t at a Taco Bell. A digital space on the internet is not a restaurant. There are digital Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos, but your avatar cannot eat them. But what’s weirder is that it wasn’t really in the metaverse, at least, not the way most people think of it.
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The wedding took place within a video game called Decentraland. You can play games, meet friends, dress up your character, and buy a virtual house using real money, but there’s no easy way to visit Decentraland in three-dimensional virtual reality. You go there in an app or your web browser. Someone made a glitchy, unofficial client that runs Decentraland with VR headsets, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Decentraland calls itself the metaverse, though, and so do lots of other people. Corporations like Taco Bell do, too. Plus, it looks just as ridiculous as what Mark Zuckerberg is promoting. I’m willing to call it the metaverse if you are.
But the Taco Bell wedding in the metaverse was a real wedding. When Sheel and Amruta’s avatars kissed, reflecting a real life kiss by the couple, the licensed officiant pronounced they were legally married. As their digital lips met for the first time as newlyweds, Taco Bell’s signature gong sound rang out in celebration.
I tuned in at 10 PM on a Friday from Brooklyn, late because the wedding happened on West Coast time. As I dialed down the brightness on my laptop’s screen, what looked like dozens of guests mulled around outside the digital Taco Bell. Some were friends and family calling in from as far away as India, but many of were random Decentraland users logging on for the event. Floating paper lanterns made out of Taco Bell take-out bags lit the way through a surreal neon forest, with hot sauce trees and bushes with nacho cheese for leaves. As we waited for the wedding to start, people made their avatars break-dance and strike poses using Decentraland’s built-in emote reactions.
The wedding wasn’t just Taco Bell themed, it was also a traditional Indian ceremony, hosted by actor Kal Penn, whose bearded Decentraland character ran around in a red tuxedo. Immediately, things got weird. Sheel burst onto the scene atop a purple elephant in a procession called a baraat escorting the groom to the site of the wedding. You can’t ride on things in Decentraland, so Taco Bell had to work with the platform to create a brand new feature for Sheel’s entrance. High on his elephant, Sheel used his avatar’s “make it rain” emote to toss dollar bills into the virtual crowd.
“If I could make my avatar cry, I would,” Kal Penn said.
Hearing the couple talk about their excitement, and the tech-support hoops Taco Bell jumped through to get their families on-boarded on the metaverse, it was clear the soon-to-be-newlyweds thought the whole thing was funny. But it was meaningful too. “I think it’s both,” Sheel told me in a Zoom call. “Taco Bell as a brand is sort of like us, we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
I should acknowledge what the Taco Bell wedding in the metaverse was: an advertisement. It was a PR event tailored to incredulous journalists like me in hopes we would write about it. I took the bait, and here you are reading the words “Taco Bell” over and over. Getting hungry yet? Maybe I’m a sucker, but I would do it again, because to me, this cultural episode was so much more than a marketing gimmick.
This was not the first wedding in the metaverse, nor was it the first wedding at a Taco Bell. There have been weddings on metaverse platforms since at least 2021, and a lucky 777 people have been married at the romantic real-world Taco Bell Cantina in Las Vegas, according to the company. But Sheel and Amruta’s wedding was still special in a uniquely 2023 fashion.
After three years of pandemic, an American insurrection, and the biggest war in Europe since 1945, the world has been through so much tragedy and ecstasy that it takes a hell of a lot to impress people. What’s a Taco Bell to do if it wants to earn a little publicity? You invent a new category. You, a brand, take something that already exists, and by the power of your brand, you declare that it is a new thing and you are its master. Like the wedding itself, the metaverse as a product exists more as corporate promotion vehicle and a sinkhole for corporate money, less so as a product that people use in their everyday lives. So who’s to say you can’t pull a little stunt there?
In that sense, the Taco Bell wedding was the ideal representation of the metaverse. When Mark Zuckerberg announced he was changing his company’s name to Meta, he said he would build “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” Zuckerberg promised “you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.”
If that’s the metaverse, we’re nowhere near it, and yet Zuckerberg will tell you that it’s a real place that you can visit right now. The metaverse is a weird half-representation of itself—it’s Schrödinger’s platform, it exists and doesn’t exist at the same time, depending on how you look at it. On Meta’s Horizon Worlds, you will find none of Zuckerberg’s futuristic, life-replacing simulations. This is no “alternate reality.” Instead, it’s a boring video game that’s in such early stages the characters don’t even have legs yet. No matter which metaverse platform you use—and there are many, including Decentraland—you’ll find much the same.
Who better than Taco Bell to adopt this system, a restaurant where the food is not Mexican but “Mexican inspired?” Just like the metaverse itself, the only thing the Taco Bell wedding embodied was its own inconsistency. It was an unfulfilled dream fueled by hype that could only be successful if you leaned into and celebrated its shortcomings. And lean in we did.
Over on Twitch, the party was just getting started. “The bride has arrived, y’all, let’s go!” said Twitch streamer LEGIQN, who partnered with Taco Bell to provide the only official way to watch the wedding outside of Decentraland. In the event’s single normal moment, a breathy love song tailor-made for weddings played as Amruta walked down the aisle. That sense of regularity faded as she approached and then floated next to the groom, her feet glitching awkwardly along the way—Decentraland still hasn’t figured out stairs.
“This is a place for positivity right now,” LEGIQN said, headphones on and dressed in a taco-print blazer. ”I’ve been cradling chalupas for 17 hours waiting for this to begin.”
LEGIQN, also known by his real-world handle Jordan Payton, is a Twitch streamer with a following of 263,000 people. He entertains them nightly with highly-produced videos, cracking jokes, talking to fans, and sniping people on Fortnite and Call of Duty. That is to say, he’s exactly the type you want commentating on your virtual wedding. “Taco Bell is in the chat guys,” he told his viewers. “Chat, this is happening. This is a real wedding, like they’re for real gonna be married after this is done.”
If you were watching along at home, it would have been difficult to hear what Kal Pen, the bride and groom, and the officiant were saying, because LEGIQN spoke through every minute of the ceremony. He shouted out his followers and made up little songs, proclaiming his love for Taco Bell as he showed off his avatar’s various outfits. LEGIQN was doing his schtick, exactly what Taco Bell paid him to do.
Sheel and Amruta’s avatars faced each other across the sacred fire that is the cornerstone of Hindu and Jain weddings, only this one was made of Taco Bell’s signature Fire Sauce. Their characters stood beneath a metaverse mandap, a four-pillared structure that serves as the focal point for the ceremony.
The nuptials had none of the quiet spectacle you would expect at a regular wedding, because so many of the people in attendance were using Decentraland’s applaud feature, filling the hall with the sound of clapping. “@tacobell is so goated for this,” one user said.
Suddenly, a platform lifted the couple into the sky, floating in stuttering jerky movements as the system lagged. In real life, it would have been amazing. At some point, though, I realized the whole thing was mostly a per-arranged cut scene; Sheel and Amruta didn’t seem in control of their movements.
Floating above the crowd, they exchanged vows. Sheel said his were written with help from ChatGPT.
“I Source: Gizmodo