Milk Race is a return to one theme from Super Bowl XX – grand sporting events that don’t inspire that much UK interest can have a bigger impact in game form. I know this from personal experience elsewhere too. I had only a vague interest in the Tour de France and wouldn’t watch it on TV, but I played a Commodore 64 game based on it and was fascinated by the whole idea of being part of this epic journey and event, represented one lovingly-rendered scenic stage at a time. Milk Race is based on the British equivalent long distance cycling race, so there should be a similar potential there.
The race ran for years under the sponsorship of the Milk Marketing Board, a monopoly organisation maintaining prices for dairy farmers (also inventor of the Ploughman’s Lunch) which was past its pinnacle in 1987. The previous year they had just ended another sponsorship deal which named England’s second most popular football cup (at other times the Coca-Cola Cup, Carling Cup, Capital One Cup and Carabao Cup) the Milk Cup. In six years’ time, their functions would essentially end at the hands of the Agriculture Act 1993, as would those of the Potato Marketing Scheme, which I also didn’t just make up. My favourite part of Milk Race is the fact that it chooses as its energy power-ups old-fashioned pint bottles of milk, sitting at the roadside. It’s both cynical marketing tie-in and somehow desperately charming. Perhaps it’s because now, the other side of the rise of supermarket buying power, the idea of milk as monolith now seems such a bizarre one.
I mention that as my favourite part, because the game doesn’t do much else to live up to the imagination-firing potential of the route map it opens with. You control a cyclist and move around a view of a road running from left to right of the screen, as well as changing gears and watching the gradient of the road and and the cyclist’s energy, which needs the odd dairy top-up if you’re moving at any kind of speed. The massed peloton of riders all around you and the support car bringing up the rear give a bit of a sense of being part of a big event. Once again, though, you’re really competing against a countdown clock and the competitors are academic. There is more milk than race.
Worse, while there is a gesture towards spectators and scenery going by, there is barely any sense at all of really going anywhere. It’s just a long, functional but dull-looking road. Hull, Leicester, Birmingham, Westminster; it makes no difference. Perhaps the monotony has some more resemblance to the real experience of taking part in such a race, emphasising endurance above all else, but it doesn’t make for a good experience in the game. And besides, perusing YouTube suggests that the entirety of Milk Race could be completed in twenty minutes, which is barely endurance at all. At least if they’d have gone Desert Bus on the whole thing and put it in real time it would hold more of a conceptual fascination as a challenge, and not just as a milk marketing artefact.
