The True Crime Story Of A GameFAQs User Who Just Wanted More Mountain Dew

"Operation Soda Steal" was a marvel of modern engineering

An MS Paint drawing illustrating the GameFAQs mastermind's soda-stealing device.
An early prototype.
Screenshot: Cybershell

In 2008, GameFAQs user EpitaphILIP had an idea: what if, instead of buying a cup of soda at Taco Bell and merely drinking it, he bought a refillable cup, built a contraption leading from the cup to a container hidden in a messenger bag and proceeded to pour a whole ton of Mountain Dew.

And not just any Mountain Dew, either. The limited edition Baja Blast flavour, which at the time was only available at Taco Bell, meaning you couldn’t take it home and enjoy it whenever you wanted. Unless, you know, you somehow managed to take a whole bag’s worth home with you.

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With help from other users, they managed to engineer a solution where a Taco Bell soda cup was taken home, had part of its bottom removed and then had a tube glued into the bottom. This tube fed down EpitaphILIP’s sleeve and into a bag, where a huge container was waiting, ready to catch up all that Mountain Dew.

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All that was left for EpitaphILIP to do was the deed itself, with the biggest remaining obstacle being how to overcome the weirdness of a dude walking to the soda machine and holding the button down for minutes at a time without his cup ever filling up.

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There’s just so much to this story. The community involvement helping him solve engineering roadblocks, like how gravity would affect the flow from the tubes into the container and how to stop the soda from going flat once it arrived. The fact he actually filmed the endeavour on a digital camera. The child-like, extremely 2008 innocence where he was worried he would get caught—and whether this was even stealing, since the cup technically offered free refills—if he uploaded the video to YouTube.

Cybershell did a fantastic job rounding all this up, and you can see his video explaining the whole thing below:

Cybershell (YouTube)