The WWE wanted to bring back brooding superstar Bray Wyatt for the first time since July 2021. PepsiCo sought to resurrect its Pitch Black flavor of Mountain Dew, which had been dormant since 2019. Tag teams have formed under far flimsier premises.

Almost a year before WWE’s Royal Rumble on Jan. 28, WWE and PepsiCo began talking about what a Pitch Black comeback could look like at a WWE event. During one of Craig Stimmel’s first meetings at WWE last year as its new svp and head of global sales and partnerships, he sat across from Paul “Triple H” Levesque and his WWE creative team as they devised a plan for a glow-in-the-dark painted and LED-illuminated match in a blacked-out Alamodome in San Antonio.

To make it happen, they put together a TV crew led by executive producer Kevin Dunn and evp of WWE television Chris Kaiser—”these guys that put the magic behind these matches,” according to Stimmel. The team was ready, but slightly skeptical.

“‘We think we can do this,’” Stimmel recalls them saying. “‘We don’t know exactly what it’s gonna look like, but we think we can do it.’”

But this was no one-night event. The WWE began teasing Wyatt’s return in October and, by November, had mouthy, sunglasses-clad newcomer LA Knight antagonizing him. The match was announced in December and, just two weeks before the Royal Rumble, the WWE staff was testing the concept and color palette before a show in Green Bay, Wisc., to make sure it looked right.

From the colored contact lenses WWE creative svp Julie Sbuttoni placed in Wyatt’s eyes to the LED-lit Pitch Black logo on the ring canvas, glowing ring ropes, LA Knight’s neon costume and the luminous beads that spilled from the collapsed announcers’ table, the match popped both in the ring and on screen.

PepsiCo got its perfect Pitch Black match, as well as an unexpected pitch. During a post-match press conference, Royal Rumble winner Cody Rhodes pulled a Mountain Dew Pitch Black bottle off a podium and took a swig—what he claimed was his first taste of sugar in three months since recovering from a torn pectoral muscle, and shared yet another anecdote about how his bus driver saw ads around the Alamodome and craved a Pitch Black.

Within seconds, Stimmel ran into the Alamodome’s hallway, grabbed WWE vp of digital media Steve Braband and had the clip posted to social media, with Mountain Dew tagged.

“It speaks to powerful brands and our talent,” Stimmel said. “Cody Rhodes was not involved—he wasn’t being paid by Mountain Dew, and he’s not involved with anything that we were doing—but when you have a big brand like that, he’s drawn to it.”