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Most people use peanut butter and jelly when it comes to picking a simile to describe things that complement each other perfectly but there are a number of other culinary combinations out there that I think deserve more respect, like red wine and a ribeye, McDonald’s breakfast and a hangover, and Hot Cheetos and an Arizona Iced Tea after doing some weed.
There’s also one duo in particular that managed to become the pairing of choice for a sizeable subset of the population, and while I’m not entirely sure how this union came to be, it seems like there’s nothing dedicated video game players like using to fuel themselves more than Mountain Dew and Doritos.
While the soda was originally designed to be mixed with whiskey, its identity evolved over time on its way to becoming the prototypical energy drink teenagers turned to before a time when Red Bull was readily available, making it the perfect sidekick for marathon sessions of GoldenEye.
Both Mountain Dew and Doritos were brands that hopped on the XTREME-centric marketing bandwagon that was all the rage around the turn of the millennium, and after doing a bit of research, it appears they both got in on the ground floor of esports by sponsoring some of the first professional gaming leagues and a marriage was inadvertently formed.
In 2008—a year after Mountain Dew introduced Game Fuel to coincide with the release of Halo 3—they officially teamed up when Doritos introduced a mystery flavor called “Quest” and encouraged people to take part in an online scavenger hunt with a series of clues that eventually revealed the chips were designed to taste like the soft drink.
In 2014, “Dewritos” got a test run in a few markets in the United States but failed to hit the mainstream. However, it appears the flavor has returned just as people around the world suddenly find themselves with plenty of time to pick up the controller with their dust-covered hands.
It might seem like an April Fools’ Day joke during a year when the world has very little tolerance for attention-seeking marketing stunts, but according to Yahoo, the chips were first spotted in Australia earlier this week and appear to be exclusive to the country for the time being.
It sort of feels like Doritos pulled a Jurassic Park here and was too busy seeing if it could make these to wonder if it should but I’ll be more than happy to be proven wrong if they end up making their way to America.