I tried the pixel-flavored Coke, and it Bytes

theverge.com:

Coke recently announced that it was making a limited-edition soda, called Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Byte. The flavor, according to the company, was “born in the metaverse” and “inspired by the playfulness of pixels, rooted in the experiences that gaming makes possible.” It’s hard to imagine better bait for The Verge, so I asked Coke if it could send me a can. And it delivered.

The can for Coke Byte (as I’ll be calling it for brevity’s sake) is a fun purple color, and has a sort of retro-game aesthetic — it says “recycle me to play again” on the side, and it is adorned with cubes meant to represent pixels. I stuck it in the fridge until my wife Becky got home, and we cracked it open to finally discover what pixels taste like.

Honestly, we’re still not quite sure.

We both had the same reaction upon the first sip: “Ew. Bad. No.” Becky said it made her mouth go numb. While that didn’t happen to me, the taste was so off-putting that neither of us wanted to keep drinking it. Of course, my brand is enduring discomfort for The Content, so I drank a good 75 percent of the can before I finally gave up and dumped the rest down the drain.

It is… hard to describe the taste. To start, the soda is sickly sweet, even to someone who doesn’t mind the occasional glass of regular Coke or Sprite. It’s not just sweet, though — there’s a flavor there, but it’s not something I can describe using any of the food words I know. It’s not bright, but it’s certainly not bitter.

There’s something vaguely fruity about Coke Byte. Not in the lemon-lime Gatorade way, where it at least evokes the taste of something natural, but more like how Axe Anarchy has a “dark pomegranate” scent, or how the red NyQuil is technically berry flavored. Both Becky and I