Coca-Cola has been at the forefront of connecting with eSports fans, having worked with Riot Games on its League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) since 2013. The brand has done everything from help launch an amateur league to hosting thousands of fans in movie theaters around the globe to watch the League of Legends world championship game.
With the big game returning to the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Oct. 29, Matt Wolf, vice president of entertainment at Coca-Cola, said the company is celebrating eSports and the community of fans at the League of Legends World Finals Cinema with viewing parties across the US.
As part of this activation, Coke has enlisted Maingear to build a “1ofONE” Coke ESports custom gaming PC. Wolf said fans will have an opportunity to win this gaming machine by attending one of the cinema viewing parties.
“We believe that ice-cold Coca-Cola is the perfect refreshment for gamers and this custom experiment was the brain child of our eSports team in partnership with our friends at Maingear and our colleagues in Coca-Cola Design,” Wolf said. “It’s an innovative and fun play off the basic PC that our gamers know so well.”
Wallace Santos, CEO and founder of MAINGEAR, said Coca-Cola has been using its Coke Esports division to make a big push to support the growing eSports scene.
“They decided that they wanted to do something huge and out of the ordinary by creating a totally unique, one-of-a-kind PC gaming system,” Santos said. “Similar to Maingear’s recent partnerships with Razer and HP, Coke chose Maingear because we simply build the best PCs in the industry. At the same time, we were in the planning staging for what would become our 1ofONE initiative—a program to bring 100 percent fully custom, heavily modded PCs to market on a level never done before by a PC manufacturer.”
Santos said Coke trusted Maingear with the freedom to use its own expertise in system design and water-cooling to create this gaming PC.
“Maingear developed the necessary chassis modifications and intricate cooling system in our workshop, while working with Coke’s in-house creative team on the custom luxury automotive paint finish on the exterior,” Santos said.
The PC boasts an Intel i7-6950X 10-Core CPU, dual NVIDIA GTX 1080 graphics cards, a HyperX Fury 16GB DDR4-2666 and a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 NVMe. But the focal point of this unique rig is a real 500 milliliter Coke bottle for the centerpiece of the build.
Santos said the bottle was modified to serve as the coolant reservoir for the water-cooling system. As an added detail, Maingear was able to color match its in house blended coolant mixture to perfectly match the color of Coca-Cola.
“With Coke’s global reach, rabid fan base and commitment to support eSports, this collaboration is a natural fit, and will bring Maingear to entirely new audiences that had no idea the level of quality and degree of customization that is within reach to them,” Santos said.
Wolf said Coke is thrilled with the overwhelming positive response the announcement of the PC has generated across social media.
“This PC is a nod to our biggest fans,” Wolf said.
It’s also something that will stand alone in the eSports realm.
“We don’t have plans at this point to produce additional machines,” Wolf said.
Santos said this is the latest eSports activation for the company.
“Maingear has supported eSports for years, and has been the system of choice for countless eSports athletes,” Santos said. “In addition, Maingear systems have powered some of the biggest Esports tournaments, including last year’s Dota International, where the tournament was run entirely on Maingear X-Cube systems.”
