@CokeEsports

Submission 31,551

About

@CokeEsports is the official Twitter account for the partnership between Coca-Cola and Esports events. The account will occasionally post webcomics about gaming, often depicting gamers drinking Coca-Cola. These comics have been subject of parody and commentary, with one showing a team of online gamers drinking the soda and encouraging each other becoming an exploitable.

History

Coca-Cola began sponsoring Esports in October of 2013, when Coke Zero was announced as an official sponsor of a League of Legends "Challenger" series, a minor league series players can compete in before going pro.^[1] On June 20th, 2014, a Twitter account, @CokeEsports launched to represent Coke's Esports endeavors on Twitter^[2] (first tweets shown below).

Over the following five years, the account gained over 335,000 followers,^[3] mostly advertising Esports events they were sponsoring and occasionally posting comics about gaming with heavy Coca-Cola branding (examples shown below).

Reputation

The comics have developed a reputation of being cringeworthy and are mocked online. On January 17th, 2018, a deleted Reddit user posted one of the account's comics to /r/fellowkids,^[4] calling the Twitter a "goldmine" (shown below, left). Another posted to /r/FellowKids posted September 16th, 2017 by user Tehurnfor^[5] gained over 500 points (shown below, right).

We Were All New Players Once

On March 27th, 2017, the account posted a comic with the caption "We were all new players once," showing a team of five gamers supporting each other while drinking Coca-Cola (shown below).

The comic became an exploitable as people posted what they imagined was a more accurate representation of online gaming. On September 17th, 2017, Redditor ZipTieMyBalls^[6] posted a parody in /r/ComedyNecrophilia that gained over 660 points (shown below, left). On September 20th, Redditor The_Directors_Cut posted an edit in /r/ImGoingToHellForThis^[7] that gained over 880 points (shown below, right).