This is a big one, folks! Greg Hassett’s 1978 TRS-80 text adventure Journey to the Center of the Earth features the Coke machine described above, which means the Video Game Soda Machine Project just found a soda machine five years older than 1983’s Catch-A-Coke!
Catch-A-Coke still features the oldest graphical soda machine in the archive, but this is now the earliest confirmed soda machine appearance in a video game.