I've sometimes wondered what video game characters would smell like—I'm not the only one, as regular Kotaku roustabout Tim Rogers explored the question in depth with hideous results.
Over at Polygon, Brian Crecente has written a fun story about the act of converting video game characters themselves into smells. Sound weird? It is.
Crecente spoke with an expert from Epic-Scents, a company that makes scents based on all kinds of video game characters. Their product page doesn't list any colognes, though it kind of seems like that's where they're heading. Or maybe they're working on some scratch-n-sniff controllers?
Epic-Scents combines the attributes commonly associated with the character into a smell—one example they give is Mega Man. I kid you not, this is the process:
In the case of Mega Man, the perfumers tried to capture the essence of a boy put into a man's role.
"There is a purity in him, he has a real pure heart," Kavanaugh said, "but there is also masculinity, and bravery."
Those three notes, purity, bravery and masculinity, become the trinity of notes that form Mega Man's scent.
For the purity of heart, the perfumers went with a very fresh clear note, like a fresh tropical breeze. For Mega Man's masculine side, they introduced a musky note, to make it "closer to a men's fragrance." And finally for bravery slight citrus notes.
"Perfumers then take all of our notes and put them together into a complete fragrance that works," Kavanaugh said.
That is too awesome to be made up.
The name of the scent? "Cool Rush." Sort of like "Blue Steel," I guess, which come to think of it, would also be a great name for a video game fragrance.
The science of smells translates video game characters into scents [Polygon]