The story goes that many, many years ago, there was a gentleman quite fond of playing games of cards. He would play for hours, against his friends, but hated to stop for mealbreaks, where the host would often serve cold meat and salad, leading inevitably to greasy fingers. One day, this gentleman stumbled upon a great (and delicious) idea - he took a piece of bread, placed a slice of meat and some lettuce on top, and then topped that with another piece of bread.

Voila, the Earl of Sandwich had made a breakthrough in culinary convenience!

...that was in the 18th Century. Have we located the modern day equivalent at the E for All Expo, with a new product called Gamer Grub?


Gamer Grub is a special form of snack-food, designed specifically for gamers - and debuted at this year's E for All Expo. They're packaged in a clever, ergonomically-designed tub, to keep your fingers clean!

We spoke to a company representative here at the Expo, to find out more about this tasty treat.

The delivery system in the packaging has been designed that you flip the top ... you do eat it out of a bottle, but it's designed that way so that you keep your fingers clean and off the keyboard.

Because really, isn't that the worst thing about eating while gaming? Cutlery involves more tools, but eating with your fingers leads to greasy controllers or crumb-y keyboards. This may just work.

Now - not only are these little tubs full of some yummy snacks, the creators have also looked carefully at the scientific makeup - the vitamin and mineral count of each of the ingredients, and made sure each one is specially formulated to benefit gamers.

It's different from other snack foods in that it's been vitamin-enhanced, and the vitamins that are used have been shown to improve cognitive performance and motor function. So we've targeted specifically for gamers, to give them an edge so they can be better at playing!

It doesn't have the caffeine, so it's no something that gets you up - it is something that has a unique nutritional value that makes it different to other snack foods."

We looked up the vitamins that are included in every tub of Gamer Grub, and - on paper at least, it's a pretty action-packed little nutritional collection. The ingredients promise to boost your "core gaming systems" - and we mean things like your muscle reflexes, visual input, signal transmission and cognitive processing, to name just a few.


To get a bit more specific and scientific:

Vitamin A (as Betacarotene) Visual data signals produced by the conversion of light into nerve impulses in the eye are highly dependent on Vitamin A. These nerve signals are then transmitted to your wetware’s CPU (a.k.a. brain) for translation into biological image formats. Vitamin E (as Acetate) Vitamin E is an antioxidant that helps protect cell membranes in the body from free radical damage. To reduce their energy load, free radicals react with other chemicals in the body and interfere with normal cell functioning. Vitamin E functions like a firewall to minimize your exposure and resultant cell damage caused by free radicals (a.k.a. cell spam). Vitamin B3 / Niacin (as Niacinamide) The Vitamin B3 / Niacin plays an important role in maintaining muscle tone and promoting the health of the nervous system, eyes, and liver. Vitamin B3 / Niacin is important for normal vision and may help in the prevention of eye cataracts. Vitamin C (as Ascorbic Acid) Vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin, electron donor and antioxidant that is necessary for normal growth and development. Vitamin C is highly concentrated in the eye and brain nerve endings.

Magnesium Magnesium ions are essential to basic nucleic acid chemistry and thus are essential to all cells of all known living organisms. Magnesium is found predominantly inside cells of body tissues and organs. Magnesium is similar to a motherboard and is needed for more than 300 biochemical reactions in the body. It helps maintain normal muscle and nerve function. Choline (as Choline Bitartrate) Choline is needed for structural integrity and signaling roles for cell membranes and cholinergic neurotransmission. Neurotransmission is the electrical transmission and routing of data signals in the nervous system. Such data transmission is used to deploy muscle reactions. Choline is a basic element needed to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and research supports that memory, intelligence and mood involve acetylcholine metabolism in the brain. L-Glutamic Acid L-Glutamic Acid is involved with nerve cell data input and output channels. The ion of Glutamic Acid is known as Glutamate. Glutamate is the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian nervous system. Nerve impulses trigger the release and binding of glutamate among nerve cells. Because of its role in synaptic plasticity, it is believed that glutamic acid is involved in cognitive functions like learning and memory.

So - sure, there's a bunch of good stuff packed into a snack... but what actually are they?

Our spokesman describes them to us:

Strategy Chocolate - it's a tasty chocolate treat...

Action Pizza - a blend that tastes just like pizza - it seems to be a real favourite!

Racing Wasabi - a wasabi and mustard blend that has a real kick, the two flavours complement each other really well.

Sports PB&J - it's simply meant to taste like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

He explains that while the Wasabi is his favourite flavour, and "Everybody loves chocolate!", the most popular tastes at the Expo seemed to be - surprisingly - both the Pizza and PB&J. While we were chatting at the booth, gamers kept strolling up and picking up cups of snacks, grinning at the booth girls.

While the product is not yet ready for retail (they're working towards a 2009 shelf date in the US - and are looking enthusiastically at exporting the product overseas), we managed to get our grubby paws (heh) on a sample of each of the four tasty flavours, and have a bit of a review for you.

Strategy Chocolate
A mix of salty and sweet, this one contains white chocolate chips, dried cherries, almonds and chocolate-coated raisins. While on the surface this sounds like it'd be the best of the bunch for those gamers with a sweet tooth, the addition of the fruit saves this one from being too sweet, instead resulting in a salty/sweet blend that we can't help but want more of.

Action Pizza
Coming from the land of Pizza Shapes, this was up against some stiff competition. Diverse flavours of pizza pitas and cashews, tomato sesame sticks, tomato almonds, cheese pitas and mozzarella peanuts merge to make a pretty satisfyingly crunchy snack. I'm not sure if I like it outright, but I'm going to eat the rest of what I've got, just to make sure.

Sports PB&J
We'll be the first to admit that while peanut butter + jelly is a winning combination, it's not something that's familiar to our Australian palates, so this one missed the mark a bit. Ignoring that little detail, this one's packed with both peanuts and peanut butter chips, plus little strawberry jelly chips and even cubes of sweet bread. I'm not entirely convinced that it quite replicates a sandwich, but it's pretty nifty.

Racing Wasabi
Wow. Our spokesman told us that these were his favourite and - honestly, I can see why. I'm glad we left these for last, because - wow. Wasabi soy almonds and peanuts combine with traditional wasabi peas, honey mustard sesame sticks, and some pita chips thrown in for good measure. These pack some real spice - we were glad of the water we had on hand, but yum, I wish we had some more!

---

At this stage, the Gamer Grub people are finalising some details of the product. The recipes are sorted, the packaging complete (and looks great!), but they don't yet have a manufacturing deal. Once they do get that deal, they're looking at something pretty big - they've just been named Official Snack Supplier for World Cyber Games USA. Not a bad deal for something that was only launched this weekend!