'Soda Drinker Pro' Is the Greatest Soda Drinking Video Game Ever Made

William Brierly said his own soda, Bonus Soda, is unlike any he's ever had before. "It's tart, and there's hibiscus in there," Brierly told me. "Cinnamon and citrus. Cranberry. I love it. I drink it. All the places that stock it reorder it all the time."

Bonus Soda has an elegantly designed logo by Luigi Guatieri, artist from the game Elegy for a Dead World, and a warm pink hue. To keep things economic and environmental, Brierly is reaching out to individual bottlers and shipping out the extract instead of moving heavy glass around the country. As the sodas spread, Brierly hopes that the people who try it, like it, and follow up online to see the video game it came from: Soda Drinker Pro, the most popular soda drinking simulation of all time, now available on Steam and Xbox One.

For years, Soda Drinker Pro has been one of gaming's loveliest inside gags, one that has extended far beyond the reaches of the normal punchline. On top of the PC and console version, and the actual soda, there's an Oculus build, fan fiction, cosplayers, and a version to help with stroke victims, created after someone at MyoPro ordered some sodas from Brierly and noticed the shipping address was their own building.

Soda Drinker Pro is an an FPS (first-person soda sim) that has you wander around various settings with a soda in hand. You can listen to yourself talk about how nice it is to have a soda, be it on the beach, in a conference room before a big meeting, or inside of someone's mouth. You can also pick up additional bonus sodas, the namesake for Brierly's real soda. Each level ends when you finish your soda and quench your thirst.

Also worth mentioning is that 90 percent of the game is hidden in a door in the second stage, a K-hole dreamscape called Vivian Clark. Brierly said that since the game already looks like something that'd install malware and mysterious toolbars on your computer, it's only appropriate that the real game is hidden below the surface. If you miss it, you can just keep drinking soda over the span of 100 levels.

"The world of simulating sodas is pretty serious," Brierly said. "We always treat it like we were explaining Microsoft Flight Simulator. The dynamic fluids engine, how we captured the carbonation levels. It's fun at the shows, we like to set up next to AAA games. This isn't Soda Drinker Amatuer, it's Soda Drinker Pro."

[Caption: The Xbox finally has a killer app. Credit: Soda Drinker Pro]

Brierly's big tasty adventure began when he thought, as Canadian hero Kim Mitchell often advocates, he might as well go for a soda. Having no sodas, Brierly said he woke up fitful in the middle of the night and decided that if he couldn't drink a soda in real life, he'd program a five-level game about drinking soda instead. Soda Drinker Pro landed on Xbox because, at an event hosted by the Unity game engine, Brierly joked that no console could handle his game. The person he was talking to happened to have connections at Microsoft, and thought it'd be even funnier to test that theory.

Games' weirdest fans soon got soda fever. Coast to coast, the idiot elite couldn't stop talking about this surreal experience of trudging from environment to environment, slurping fizzy drinks in Brierly's melted expanses.

According to Brierly, the final version of Soda Drinker Pro is 24 times bigger than the previous build, most of the content is stashed away in Vivian Clark, which now loops back to Soda Drinker for the diligent players who want to close the loose narrative. The options also let you customize the sodas, which can unlock new modes, like "spaghetti."

"It's a thirst-quenching experience that has a lot more than what you expect," Brierly said.