10 years ago, an extremely weird game called Soda Drinker Pro was released on Xbox and Steam. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see silly simulation-style titles like PowerWash Simulator and Lawn Mowing Simulator, but Soda Drinker Pro hit the ground running long before this trend came to fruition. Despite its terrible visuals, harsh audio design, and extremely limited gameplay, it caught on as a meme, with many reviewers giving it 5 out of 5 stars as a joke. However, unknown to many, there’s actually a second full game hidden inside Soda Drinker Pro that most players completely overlook, and somehow, it’s even weirder than a soda drinking simulator.
One Day to Make Soda
Soda Drinker Pro is the brainchild of Will Brierly, an indie developer who was apparently so infatuated with drinking soda, that he made an entire game out of it. In a 2013 interview with Giant Bomb, Brierly jokingly explained that “One night, I woke up at 4 AM because I was so thirsty, but I didn’t have any soda. But I could make a game about drinking soda. So I sat down at my computer, and by 11 PM the next night, the first five levels were done, and it just went from there.” Though the base of the experience was created on that fateful night in 2008, development continued for another 8 years until it was finally released.
Currently, Soda Drinker Pro holds a paltry 30% approval rating on Metacritic. After playing the base game for a few minutes, it’s easy to see why. Over 100 levels, you walk around crude environments at a snail’s pace, sipping on a soda, collecting “bonussodas”, and that’s it. Once you drink all of your soda, it’s onto the next level. Rinse and repeat until you’ve drank soda in more places than you might care to.
The whole experience is a super weird and irreverent joke with very little gameplay value, which led many critics to bash it, including Destructoid, who confidently remarked: “there are no redeeming qualities to Soda Drinker Pro”. Funnily enough, any critic who completely disregarded Soda Drinker Pro also exposed themselves a bit, as the secret game inside, the “real” game, if you will, is actually pretty damn fun, assuming you know that it exists. Like Frog Fractions or other game-within-a-games, Soda Drinker Pro goes from a waste of time to a worthwhile purchase once you discover this hilariously well-kept secret.
Psychedelic Mini-Games
Accessing the hidden game in Soda Drinker Pro is actually very easy, provided you know what to look for. In the second level, The Park: Walking With a Nice Cold Soda, you can spot a crudely drawn cabin on one of the walls. If you walk toward the door of the cabin, you’ll actually clip through the wall, prompting a load and putting you at the title screen of the secret game: Vivian Clark.
The best way to describe Vivian Clark is “WarioWare on drugs”. Much like WarioWare, Vivian Clark involves clearing dozens of unique mini-games, all of which are exceptionally weird, without losing your continues. At the start of the game, you control a raindrop that has freshly fallen from its cloud, and if you run into one of the many objects floating in the sky, you start a mini-game. In one mini-game, you dash around space in a ship, shooting your enemies and collecting power-ups like Asteroids. Another tasks you with completing a 3D obstacle course, while another has you driving around, dodging giant monsters.
If you fail during a mini-game, you’re sent to a mysterious cave where dozens of portraits surround a campfire, and three stopwatches sit nearby. Picking up one of these stopwatches throws you into another mini-game. Once you run out of stopwatches, it’s game over, and the entire loop resets. In total, there are over 50 mini-games to discover, and the game never explains what the goal of each mini-game is. Because of this, the game feels like a constant psychedelic trip, where you’re never quite sure if you’re making progress or playing the game “correctly”. In my opinion, though, that’s kind of the point.
When you hear Will Brierly talk about Soda Drinker Pro, he clearly doesn’t take it seriously at all, and you can tell that the game came from a truly creative person. It kind of makes the whole thing even funnier. What kind of madman would develop an unhinged mini-game collection and then decide to hide it within an objectively bad “simulator” game? In my opinion, the same kind of developer who probably gets a kick out of every bad review, as he knows he pulled a fast one on the critic. Even if Soda Drinker Pro and Vivian Clark aren’t really your thing, you have to admit the whole package is a pretty funny prank on the player and media, even if it stunted its own popularity.
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