Surge Is Back! These 10 Sodas Should Be Next

Everyone loves coffee. Everyone loves soda. In 2006, Coca-cola put that together into one can't-miss idea: What if we released a coffee soda? The result was Coke BlāK, a carbonated beverage that tasted just like bubbly iced coffee and packaged in a fancy glass bottle. It lasted all of two years before it was given the axe. How did it taste, you ask? Amazing. Or at least my high-school self thought so, and I didn't even like coffee back then. Pepsi also tried its hand at a coffee cola, Pepsi Kona, in the '90s, but gave up on the drink soon after its release. Now that coffee is more of a dominant force in our society than ever, it's time both beverages made a comeback.

Pumpkin spice is all the rage right now, but Pepsi was bringing this holiday flavor to soda as far back as 2004. After a brief disappearance from the market, which prompted at least one petition from fans calling for its return, Pepsi brought the drink back in the form of the slightly spicier Christmas Pepsi. That too disappeared, leaving a huge spicy hole on convenience store shelves.

PepsiCo's Josta may have been one of the first real "energy drinks" to hit American shores, and definitely the first to be made by a major soda manufacturer. Released in 1995, Josta included guarana, now an energy drink staple, and competed with the recently revived Jolt soda for caffeine-happy customers before it was dropped a year before the new millennium.

Why did it fail? Based on fan descriptions, Josta sounds like an acquired taste. From SaveJosta's website:

[Its flavor is] very difficult to describe. It’s safe to say it was one of the most uniquely-flavored beverages ever sold in the mainstream sodamarket (sic). It is fruity and berry like, with a bit of dark spices and the astringent bite of guarana berries. The color is a deep red, almost brown.

I initially didn’t know what to make of it, but after a couple bottles fell completely in love.

Considering the drink was released (and discontinued) around the same time as Surge, which targeted a similar demographic, and the fact that it was produced by Coca-Cola's main rival, one could see Josta enjoying its own triumphant return. The soda even has a the requisite grass-roots lobbying group, although their recent petition to bring back Josta had fewer than 100 signatures at press time.

dnL—the 7-Up logo upside-down—was an attempt to get parent company Cadbury Schweppes in on the xtreme drink craze. Unlike its parent brand, which tried to court an un-cola image, dnL was everything 7-Up was not: caffeinated, neon green, and marketed as an even more hip/cool/rad version of Mountain Dew. The soda's official website, archived here, invites interested consumers to "Check It" and promotes dnL's affiliation with the extreme snowboarding game SSX 3. After lagging sales, which Cadbury Schweppes America's CEO blamed on the product's poor fit with the 7-Up brand, dnL was discontinued in 2006.

Compared with Coke, which repeatedly (and sometimes catastrophically) experimented with new flavors, Sprite has always been relatively stable. But in 2003, Coca-Cola decided to change that by releasing Sprite Remix. Remix came in three flavors—Tropical, Berryclear, and Aruba Jam—and each commercial featured plenty of record scratching and reminders that this wasn't your parent's soda, man. Soon it wasn't anyone's soda. Sprite Remix was cut in 2005.

Don't even start with me about how this soda still exists, because Diet Coke Lime, which I believe was kept around just to taunt me, is a but a pale shadow of the magic that was real actual regular Coke Lime. It was tangy, it didn't have that metallic Diet Coke burn, and even though it only lasted from 2005 to 2006, those were some good times. Also, the bottle's green and red branding looked pretty darn cool.

This lemon-flavored cola seemed like a great idea, but apparently never quite caught on. It had an initial run from 2000 through 2006—enough time to disturb most of America with a string of strange commercials—before being dropped. Twist briefly reappeared for the 2008 NFL season before disappearing again from shelves.

OK soda might be one of the strangest soft drinks every brought to market. As BuzzFeed recounts in its history of the failed brand, Coca-Cola decided in 1993 that it needed a product that would connect with cynical Gen-Xers who didn't want to drink anything made by the "the man." The solution? Make a soda just as ironic and disaffected as its target demographic. OK adopted a faux-nihilist/dystopian advertising campaign that, among other slogans, included:

“What’s the point of OK? Well, what’s the point of anything?”

"OK soda says 'Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything'"

"It's OK for you to think I'm not OK but I am"

In the end, sales weren't OK. The soda never made it out of test markets and was discontinued in 1995.

In 1997, Orbitz soda hit shelves, wowing consumers with its weird little balls that never sank to the bottom of the bottle. That's not actually enough to sell soda though, at least long term. A weird early-internet marketing campaign, centered around "Planet Orbitz" and what TIME called a "cough-syrupy taste" didn't help matters. After a year, Orbitz the soda was gone, but it lives on through its URL, Orbitz.com, which now directs to the popular travel site of the same name.

Crystal Pepsi was only around for about a year in its original form, and then for another brief aborted reboot, but you wouldn't know it from the absolute fervor around bringing back the clear beverage. And that's all it was, really; just clear cola. But Pepsi made an impression with some crazy early advertising, including a 1993 super bowl spot featuring Van Halen's "Right Now."

The drink didn't meet sales goals and it was canned soon after, but then quickly reappeared as a citrus soda known only as Crystal. That flopped too, and now Crystal Pepsi only exists in the memories of its seemingly infinite fans. Those people were whipped into a frenzy last year when a hoax-site called the Wall Street Sentinel reported an early 2014 comeback. That rumor was debunked, however, and the world still yearns for another clear soda that tastes like Pepsi—or Coke, we're not picky. Change.org is filled with Crystal Pepsi revival petitions, like this one, but without a coherent movement the soda seems far from a return.