Game Fuel

Submitted by b on Wed, 04/18/2018 - 08:41

I admit that I get a little annoyed whenever I see Doritos and Mt. Dew being peddled as 'game fuel'. There are Doritos and Mt. Dew displays next to or in the video game department of several stores, game awards shows are sponsored by Mt. Dew and Doritos, you can sometimes get secret codes on Mt. Dew and/or Doritos to give you perks in some video game or other, and so on. Mt. Dew and Doritos have somehow become the de facto food and drink of people who play video games, and it really bothers me, but maybe not for the reason you're thinking.

Yes, it's somehow a stereotype now that people who enjoy a video game now and again subsist primarily on junk food and soda, which is currently represented by the twin galaxies of Mt. Dew and Doritos. And, to the credit of those companies, they leaned into that stereotype pretty hardcore and marketed their stuff as the thing that you eat while you play video games. It's a stereotype that's way older than video games, though. When I was growing up, it was more Cheetos instead of Doritos, and just generic 'soda' (or 'Coke', or 'pop', whatever your regional dialect is). Or maybe pizza and a soft drink. The point is, that it wasn't necessarily Doritos and Mt. Dew.

The thing is, though, to pre-teen and teenage Me, Doritos and Mt. Dew actually were things that I ate and drank a lot. Every time I would get a little spending money in my pocket, I'd head down to the video rental store with the family, I'd pick out a game, then we'd go to the grocery store for snacks. Since Mt. Dew and Doritos were a little more expensive than Vess and generic corn chips, I didn't get to have them very often.

Until one weekend during my summer vacation in 1993.

That particular weekend I went to the video store and found that their copy of E.V.O.: Search for Eden was miraculously in stock, and ready to be rented. I had actually played it before at a friend's house, and I really liked it, but it was kind of a pain to swap the controller around every so often, and this was my chance to play it as long as I wanted without having to switch off every once in a while. So, naturally, I grabbed it.

We also went down to our local Target for some weekend snacks. I had a few dollars in my pocket, and I discovered that Target was having a pretty good sale on (you guessed it) Doritos and Mt. Dew. I was able to get two of the biggest size bags that Doritos came in (the so-called 'Family Size') and a 24-pack of Mt. Dew for something like $10. This was great! I was set for the weekend.

I got home that night, got my chips out, got my drinks out, and started playing.

I should note that my bedroom at the time was in the basement of the house. I had no exterior windows or clocks, so I had no real way to know how late it was getting or how long I had been playing, or anything like that. I do know that I didn't show up for dinner that night (I probably said something like, "I'll come and eat it later, I'm in the middle of something" when the dinner bell rang, and then never followed through). I was awake until the wee hours just playing and playing, and trying to get as far as I could in the game before I had to take it back to the rental store at the end of the weekend.

The next morning rolled around... eventually. Again, since I was in the un-windowed basement, I didn't really have a good sense of time passing. But I fired the game up again, re-opened my chips and soft drinks, and played until I was tired enough to go back to bed. I was a teenager at the time, so me not showing up on time for breakfast or lunch wasn't exactly unheard of, and I was competent enough in the kitchen that I could make a sandwich or cook some simple things if I was hungry.

But I never did any of that.

I played and played and played some more. By the end of the weekend, I had eaten all of the first bag of chips and half of the second one. I poured over half of the cans of soda on top of that, and I had played video games in a basement, without seeing the light of the sun for nearly two days.

Eventually, it was time to take the game back to the store. I had actually managed to finish it, but my celebration was short lived. Once the adrenaline wore off, I noticed that I felt bad. I was in a kind of a cloud, and everything just felt 'wrong' in a way that I can't really explain, only that I knew at the time that I needed to get something in my belly that wasn't dusted with cheese or citrus-flavored.

I lived, obviously, and I didn't suffer any ill effects or anything (that I know of, maybe there's a 25-year side effect of eating all of that junk in one setting that I'll discover later this summer). But from then on, the combination of Doritos and Mt. Dew don't really held any kind of status with me like it used to. I still like both of those things independently of each other and in small doses, or, heck, even together in larger doses, but when I'm playing games? It's not really my go-to any more.

It's just weird to me that twenty-five (!) years after I had a marathon gaming session powered by Doritos and Mt. Dew, that both Doritos and Mt. Dew have positioned themselves as the things to consume when you're in marathon gaming sessions.

And if you want to do that, that's fine, but you should also probably eat an apple or something, too. And go outside for a few minutes every once in a while, or look out a window or something.

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