Nvidia’s marketing team this week announced an Nvidia-branded shower gel and deodorant as a PR stunt for social media giveaways. As far as I can tell, their Sphynx Ampere toiletries don’t smell like new graphics cards, so who cares? However! This got me wondering: which PC gaming scent do you prefer like shower gel, perfume, deodorant, aftershave, room spray, etc.? What is the aroma of PC gaming? What boxed toiletries would you be eager to get from your aunt this Christmas? I will go first.
I’ve always liked the strong and pungent smell of ozone foreshadowing a catastrophic hardware failure. An old power source is about to run out. A new graphics card will cause instant frustration. An alarming scent has no place in an ordinary environment. A scent that makes you say, “What is that? Oh NO.” I quite like that.
Of course, perfumes rarely include a single scent, so I can extend this desire into a finished product. As a clever amateur/selkie/naiad/mossball player that looks a bit like a human when viewed from a particular angle, I crave damp smells. Trust me, I’ve tried a lot and they often want to. So what I want from a PC gaming scent is this: an old PC that boots in a mossy clearing.
Just imagine! A ground of dirt and moss, damp and mold and rotting and rotting stumps. An intoxicating note of douglas fir, that pine is punctuated by passionate grapefruit. Then a 486 has been out in this forest for decades, the raw ozone of its ancient power supply and its mechanical hard drive squeaking and kicking when you boot it up. And on top of that, it just takes a little sweet smell from the damp dust inside the PSU to dry and burn. Pretty.
I asked around the RPS treehouse — I assure you it smells great — and got a few more scent suggestions (scents?).
RPS deputy editor Alice Bee told me, “I wanted something that smelled like the satisfying feeling of shaving the fluff off your keyboard. “Not the fluff itself, which I assume would smell dire.”
Hardware editor James bravely tested reports from “a lot of people saying that the Steam Deck’s vents smell good when it’s hotter.” He came back two minutes later to declare, “It actually smells like the PC World printer area in Swindon that I sometimes go into when my dad needs office supplies.” I don’t know if that is good or bad. Let’s bottle it one of two ways.
This is controversial as vidbud Liam noticed. I think only chatlog captures:
Liam Richardson
Now wait a moment here
“Steam deck vent hood” FOR LOG IN
That thing smells like a dream
Quite often when I die in a game, I’ll tilt that bad boy towards my nostrils and allow myself to smell a bit.
It smells like EGX on day one. Fresh plastic. That is the best.
Starting to think the reason my Steam Deck wasn’t working properly was because I smelled it coming out of the vent.
Huffed away the teraflop
We may need your input to resolve the Steam Floor vent scent issue.
Anything else you’d like to sniff out, dear reader? Trust that all of these are bound to smell good, no matter how awful they sound in words.
A few potential thoughts to get you started. The smell of the new graphics card? The rich smell of a chunky paper manual? Weird factory smell inside newly opened DVD box? The scratch and sniff card that comes with the Leather Goddesses Of Phobos? Much metallic smell of blood spilled on sharp motherboard pins? I don’t know, the folds of a new racerback gaming chair are uncomfortable? I suppose you can also pick up scents from PC games, longing to sniff the virtual if you don’t find anything desirable in the physical. Let’s tell!
