Rainbow Six Siege in Your Drink
A few years ago, if you'd said we'd soon be drinking video game data mixed into our energy drinks, most people would probably have laughed. It sounds more like something from sci-fi—or maybe an elaborate joke. But sometimes, reality catches up faster than we expect.
In 2019, the folks at AKQA São Paulo came to us with a wild idea. InBev wanted to do something genuinely new for Fusion Energy drink at the Game XP event in Rio. They asked if we could encode Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege game data—videos, stats, highlights—into DNA, and then mix it into their energy drink. At first, this felt more marketing stunt than science. But then, as often happens with crazy ideas, it quickly became fascinating.
DNA data storage is nothing new, at least conceptually. Nature has been doing it for billions of years. But using DNA to store digital data—that's still cutting-edge. It's incredibly dense, stable, and efficient. In theory, a sugar cube-sized amount of DNA can store all the world's data.
So, we said yes. Why not? This is how innovation often begins, after all—with ideas so bizarre you feel a little embarrassed sharing them.
We converted Rainbow Six Siege game highlights, maps, operator data, and game files into synthetic DNA molecules. We encoded trillions of copies of the data. Each can of Fusion Energy Drink had millions of these DNA-encoded copies mixed right into the beverage.
This wasn't practical in the usual sense. Nobody drinking Fusion could actually watch gameplay highlights afterward—at least not without specialised lab equipment and hours of careful decoding. But practicality wasn't really the point. The campaign aimed to show something profound: DNA isn't just biology; it's a powerful, natural storage medium.
Think about it. Today, your photos, videos, and music live on cloud servers, flash drives, or hard drives—all vulnerable, all temporary. But DNA, under the right conditions, could last thousands or even millions of years. Your descendants might actually drink your digital family album one day. Strange, yes. But possible.
The reaction was exactly what you'd expect: a blend of amazement, confusion, and excitement. We saw people debating online about whether you could "upload" the game by drinking it (you can't). But beneath the humour, they were asking deeper questions about data storage, longevity, and even our own biology.
