Meme heists don’t get more 2008 than “Operation Baja Blast”
A caper from a time when clout actually meant something
The year was 2008. The Dark Knight asked disaffected Hot Topic shoppers, “why so serious?” Katy Perry bragged about kissing a girl. And a group of would-be engineers on a message board hatched a plan that would upend the soda industry forever: they were going to steal some Baja Blast Mountain Dew from Taco Bell.
It was a different time, a time for innovation, a time for action. With Baja Blast only available at Taco Bell, teens would need to fight the urge to eat yet another Cheesy Gordita Crunch if they were going to taste that sweet blue. But what if you could rig a system wherein which soda traveled through a cup into a receptacle? That kind of thinking requires brains, brawn, bravery, and just a little bit of luck. Enter: epitaphILIP, an MSPaint artist with time to burn and rocks to get off. And that’s where our story begins.
As retold by YouTuber Cybershell, the caper sounds like an extremely high stakes version of Ocean’s Eleven, in which the score is so prized that it leaves onlookers with one word: epic. That’s right, Operation Soda Steal (or Operation Baja Blast, as a group of outright n00bs would later call it) pwns Taco Bell. At least, until the group was pwned by its pwn petard. As the video tells, a “fucking prick” named Steve uploaded the heist video to College Humor and stole epitaphILIP’s glory. Fortune favors the bold and also stealers.
In an economy built on clout, where your next Sonic meme could be a gateway to immortality, the ingenuity involved in Operation Baja Blast deserves to live on. Thankfully, even though the original video of the crime (arguably a crime, as epitaphILIP pleads, it was actually the ethical thing to do), the soda can stay fizzy for a bit longer.