The Rise and Fall of Gamer Food

Amidst the crowd of unusual trends that have come to invade gaming since the years of its steadily increasing popularity, one of the most interesting is the invention of gaming food and drink. Like fine wine and aged cheese, so to do the big drinks companies and upstart food companies feel is the link between gaming and disgustingly high-sugar, high-fat, high-caffeine, and embarrassingly nerdy drinks and, in some cases, food

So let’s get down to business.

Gamer Grub:

So this is where the trend gets embarrassing, Gamer Grub is advertised as “the first performance snack formulated especially for gamers.” As a gamer and with some assumption that you, the reader, are also a gamer, I can confidentially say that there is something about flavors like “Action Pizza,” “Racing Wasabi,” “Strategy Chocolate” (by far the most preposterous), and “Sports PB&J” that makes me want to throw my laptop and my many consoles against the wall, burning any and all evidence of my gaming addiction, just to allow myself the luxury of being free of any association with these disturbingly cliché, overly-stylized bottles of powdered Chex mix. Although this may be many of our initial reactions, Gamer Grub reminds us of its key selling points: “Great tasting flavors,” “Ergonomic packing” (to go with my ergonomic office equipment), “No keyboard crumbs,” and perhaps the single greatest food innovation in the last three to four thousand years, “No greasy fingers.” I can have some faith in the possibly of creating a grease-free product, but to somehow say that this “grub” contains no crumbs and to be as specific as “keyboard crumbs” seems like a bit of a stretch.

Oddly enough, after nearly a year since its first making the interwebz, Gamer Grub has yet to find a retailer and perhaps that's for the best. After all, nothing says strategy like chocolate!

Game Fuel:

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Mountain Dew’s Game Fuel which is, not only, an incredibly delicious product but one that treats is target audience with a bit more respect than the aforementioned hand tubs of flavor-powered grain mix. Starting in August of 2007, Game Fuel made its debut in sync with the launch of Halo 3. The packaging was as “extreme” as you would assume, coming from Mountain Dew, but with its “citrus-cherry” flavor, it was one heck of a drink. Also a bit more useless for most gamers than the lack of “keyboard crumbs” was the upping of caffeine from the standard 92mg of regular Dew to 120mg per 20 ounce bottle of the stuff. It was like liquid headshots and frankly, saw very good reception amongst the gaming community. Although all types of gaming food are a bit on the far side of ludicrous, Game Fuel showed gamers respect and, most of all, was just a delicious, caffeine-filled romp of a soda.

Game Fuel will be making its return this June for an all-too-brief 8-week run this June. This time around, it has shed its Halo 3 endorsement and taken up the sides of World of Warcraft’s Horde and Alliance. This means one thing: two flavors. Convince your mom to buy you some while your stuck browsing the racks of the gas station as she fills up after your latest trip to the dermatologist.

Mana/Health Potions:

Last on the list, but certainly not the last product to be thought up, is Mana Energy and Health Energy potions. As you can see from the extremely photoshopped (maybe entirely artificial) picture above, this drink does take the perfect form. Coming in small shot-sized bottles, it looks like something that would be strapped to your belt in Diablo rather than something you’d pull of a store shelf in 2009. Mana sells itself as a “premium energy shot,” one of the newest trends in the energy drink industry. Apparently it just took far too much time to drink your standard sized energy drink or even those little half-cans of soda. Thank God there is something I can now drink in the time it takes for my skills to recharge in WoW. Unfortunately, there just isn’t nearly as much embarrassingly bad branding here to have fun with like there was with Gamer Grub. Sure, the website has a strong overuse of “WTF” and the fact that they relate drinking the “potions” to giving you +160 mana or HP is also a bit campy, but the product seems mostly legit or at least as legit energy drinks have ever been.

In Conclusion:

The phenomenon that is gamer food is extremely unusual, not altogether popular and hopefully, on the way out (with the exception of Game Fuel). As gaming continues to grow, becoming more mainstream than it already is, I’m willing to guess that gamers are going to become less and less tolerant with awkwardly exploiting meals like the KFC’s Guitar Hero Fully Loaded Box Meal. My God, the humanity.

It’s about time we gamers gave up the stigma of being a bunch of disgusting, living-in-our-parent’s-basement, never-felt-the-need-to-get-that-driver’s-license, morbidly obese and functionally illiterate, socially awkward simpletons, and let the big companies know that sometimes a big glass of water or cup of coffee is fine.