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I tried Coca-Cola’s new limited edition, metaverse-inspired Zero Sugar Byte soda. It tasted kind of like grape flavoring.
After I shared the announcement of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Byte, a limited edition «pixel flavored» soda that is supposed to have something to do with the metaverse, a Coca-Cola representative contacted me and asked if I’d like to try a can. I said sure, and they mailed me one.
I’ll get right to it: The soda tastes a bit like grape flavoring to me. It’s very fizzy, and much sweeter than I expected for a sugar-free drink, so much so that it starts to simulate the stickiness of high fructose corn syrup as the carbonation recedes. It reminded me slightly of grape cough syrup (it was also more viscous than I expected) or grape Pez.
I haven’t had either of those things in a long time, though, so maybe I’m mistaken about their flavors. After looking at other Coca-Cola Byte taste tests, I’m worried that I might not be qualified to taste soda. Another person who tried it said it tasted like angostura bitters and «herbs and spices.» It didn’t taste anything like those things to me. It tasted like grape. Cnet, meanwhile, said it just tasted like a sweeter Coke Zero.
Here’s what Coca-Cola Byte truly reminded me of: When I was 13 or so, I used to get one of those jumbo Pixy Stix (long plastic tubes full of flavored sugar) from an ice cream truck on the way home from school and then lie on my bed with it sticking vertically out of my mouth, as if I were at the bottom of a pond with it as my snorkel. As I ingested the candy, some amount of saliva inevitably got into the tube’s opening, dissolving the escaping sugar and forming a blockage of sludge that had to be squeezed out. (In severe cases, scissors could be used to cut the tube above the blockage, or to open the other end.) Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Byte didn’t precisely taste like grape Pixy Stix, but drinking it reminded me of that sludge, somehow.
So, it’s not bad. I liked it. Granted, I used to be a five-a-day Diet Coke drinker, and now I only allow myself to have soda of any kind once a week, so it would’ve been a treat no matter what its flavor was.
Did it taste like pixels, though? I don’t think so. Pixels don’t taste like anything, but if they did, I think they would taste like pennies and lime.
Coca-Cola also says that Coca-Cola Byte is «reminiscent of powering up a game.» People don’t really say that they’re «powering up» games anymore, so while trying to decide if it really was reminiscent of that, I once again thought of the past: drinking Bawls while playing Warcraft 3 at an internet café. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Byte doesn’t taste like Bawls, although to be honest I can’t remember exactly what Bawls tastes like. I know it’s made with guarana, though, and there’s none of that in Byte. Maybe Byte just tastes like 2002?
Some people hold on to cans of special edition Coke and sell them to collectors—someone recently sold a case of Stranger Things Coke for $50, for example—and the Coca-Cola rep told me that fewer than 25,000 of these Byte cases are available. That’s one way to make a $7 can of soda worth $8, but you don’t get to drink it. There are probably better things to invest in than novelty soda.
All things considered, Coca-Cola Byte is a pretty decent representative for the metaverse. Its scarcity has been controlled to create the impression that it’s valuable, but it exists only to be desired, and its actual qualities seem impossible to define—the more you try to know what it is, the more it fizzes into nothingness. (Or a sort of grape flavor, maybe.)
Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley alongside Apple and Microsoft, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on the early personal computers his parents brought home. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, Bushido Blade (yeah, he had Bleem!), and all the shooters they call «boomer shooters» now. In 2006, Tyler wrote his first professional review of a videogame: Super Dragon Ball Z for the PS2. He thought it was OK. In 2011, he joined PC Gamer, and today he’s focused on the site’s news coverage. After work, he practices boxing and adds to his 1,200 hours in Rocket League.
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