In 1932, Britain’s national coalition government, headed by Labour Party co-founder Ramsey McDonald, decided to take action to stabilise the dairy industry. The following year, it set up a co-operative of every dairy farmer in England and Wales, and called it the Milk Marketing Board. It acted as a national monopoly seller of milk, fixing prices and sharing out its income with regional costs and quality of product taken into account. It continued for half a century and also took responsibility for advertising. Many Brits of a certain age will forever associate the football club Accrington Stanley with milk, thanks to the work of the Milk Marketing Board.

As part of this role, the Milk Marketing Board took on sports sponsorship opportunities. This included making the second most popular cup competition in English men’s football, the League Cup, into the Milk Cup for a period (it has since been the Coca-Cola Cup, Carling Cup, and Carabao Cup, among other names). By 1987, the Board had given up on the cup, but was still maintaining a longer-running sponsorship elsewhere in sport. From 1958 until 1993 (the year before the abolition of the Milk Marketing Board) Britain’s leading cycling race was renamed from the Tour of Britain to the Milk Race.

Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s intervened directly and indirectly in the home computer space (see the sections of my Elite post on the BBC Micro and British Telecom’s software ventures). The government were, however, unlikely to invent any co-operatives to support the country’s independent software developers. Those developers were left to deal with evolving market forces. By 1987, conditions were becoming tougher, as powerful major players became more dominant, and smaller developers were having to adjust accordingly. It’s a change demonstrated by the story of those responsible for making a successful game based on the Milk Race.

  • Milk Race (Mastertronic, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Milk Race (Mastertronic, 1987, Commodore 64)

Mike Cohen and Roger Lees, based in Manchester commuter town Poynton, set up games company MC Lothlorien in 1982. It ended up with its Tolkien rapper name out of a combination of Cohen’s initials and the name of Lees’ existing family business. They weren’t yet the most confident programmers, but they wanted to make war games and saw that there was a gap for them. Mike Cohen’s first game, put out before they even settled on the name, was Tyrant of Athens for the ZX81. He paid £95 for an ad in the March 1982 Your Computer, promising his wife he would buy a dishwasher if it made any money. “We expected 20 replies,” Cohen later told Crash, “which would have covered the cost of the ad. We got 200 replies within two weeks!” He bought the dishwasher.

  • Tyrant of Athens (MC Associates, 1982, ZX81)

By the end of the year, MC Lothlorien was advertising five games in Computer & Video Games, across three different formats. None of their games were ever big chart hits – Redcoats hit the lower reaches of the BBC/Electron top 20 in October 1984, Waterloo made it as high as #8 in the BBC Micro chart in December 1985, and that was about it. They had a successful niche though, of a kind big enough to get them profiled in Crash even before either of those visits to the charts. As MC Lothlorien’s Geoff Street explained in that profile: “Retailers find that they have a sales explosion on a new game but if they haven’t got rid of it within a month they’re stuck with the stock. But that isn’t the case with ours — the war games that is — and they say they can sell them for much, much longer.”

  • Redcoats (MC Lothlorien, 1984, BBC Micro)
  • Redcoats (MC Lothlorien, 1984, BBC Micro)
  • Waterloo (MC Lothlorien, 1985, BBC Micro)
  • Waterloo (MC Lothlorien, 1985, BBC Micro)

Having started off with the ZX81, a lot changed in a few years, and MC Lothlorien tried to expand what they could do. They signed a deal with Argus, who had their own war game experience having released The Fall of Rome and taken it to the top of the (Argus-published) charts in 1984. Mike Cohen later told Retro Gamer that not much had ended up coming out that deal, but Argus had directed them towards an opportunity when nearby games company A’n’F got into financial trouble. MC Lothlorien stepped in upon liquidation and subsumed the remains of A’n’F, taking on Doug Anderson as a director and renaming to Icon Design.

Another helpful part of the Argus link was that Mike Cohen got to know Ron Harris, who went on to become games buyer at budget games giants Mastertronic. That gave the new Icon Design a route into working with Mastertronic, and they went for it. When Mastertronic decided to release a game based on the Milk Race, they gave the task of creating it to Icon Design. The main programmer on the Spectrum version was Phil Berry, who had played a part in the creation of A’n’F’s most iconic game: early ladder-based platformer Chuckie Egg.

  • Chuckie Egg (A’n’F, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • Chuckie Egg (A’n’F, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

Nigel Alderton came up with the original Spectrum Chuckie Egg mostly alone, but there was one exception. “A mate of mine – Phil Berry – was round at my house one day around the time I was designing the later screens and he helped with a couple of the screen layouts – six and seven I think”. Credits and information on Berry are otherwise pretty scant, but it seems to make sense that he stayed linked to A’n’F on at least some level, and so ended up at Icon Design, who would have needed to look outside MC Lothlorien’s war game specialists for a cycling game. Graphics, meanwhile, were provided by Stuart J. Ruecroft, whose previous credits included the MSX version of Green Beret, and who can still be found posting impressive digital art today.

Ruecroft’s work on Milk Race included producing a lovely rendition of the race’s route, the better to give players a sense of taking part in a familiar event. He also designed some more limited scenery to go past as you progress through the thirteen stages, trying to improve your position among the 84 cyclists in the event. Rather than a joystick waggling test of endurance, Milk Race goes in for a combination of tactics and positioning, with a bit of an arcade flourish. 

You must use your gears to help tackle the various gradients and there is a lot of dodging to do, with both competitors and support vehicles providing potential sources of time-consuming crashes. There is also the necessity of collecting energy powerups, which come in the form of giant pint bottles of milk near the side of the road. It’s an obvious marketing tie-in, yet rather charming in its execution, in a way that betters anything else in the game.

  • Milk Race (Mastertronic, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Milk Race (Mastertronic, 1987, ZX Spectrum)

Tamara Howard in Sinclair User summarised the ups and downs of the game: “there are lots of twiddly bits to be considered, like speed, energy, gear and the slope of the road […] when you get into the pack, it’s too easy to get knocked over because you can’t tell which bike is you”. She was impressed, writing that “for a budget game, this is pretty hot stuff”. That was more positive than most reviewers got.

A Crash reviewer wrote that “I enjoyed my first race but the game quickly became tedious. The graphics aren’t revolutionary but they’re satisfactory. It’s the simplicity that’s the main problem.” They landed on the verdict that “there’s not enough content to justify even a price of £1.99”. Your Sinclair described Milk Race as a “fast moving cheapie that’s taken the chart by storm” but called it “not likely to provide long-term enjoyment” and “a sort of poor man’s Tour de France”. It’s not 100% clear whether they meant the game or the real-life race, but Zzap! 64’s Julian Rignall was more straightforward on the same point: “If you want a good cycling game, track down a copy of Activision’s Tour de France – it’s ten times better than this”. 

  • Tour de France (Activision, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Tour de France (Activision, 1985, Commodore 64)

Rignall was scathing more generally. “First impressions aren’t favourable […] the badly animated riders, and childish marshall’s car. Second impressions aren’t particularly favourable either – the race isn’t at all thrilling”. Bohdan Buciek in Commodore User felt similarly. “What you’ve got to endure is really 13 laps of pretty similar thrills and spills. Even the background graphics don’t vary much […] the same cloth-capped crowd turn up in every town”. He also that its success might instead have been based on the power and reputation of Mastertronic: “if you’re a ‘Tronic addict you’ve probably bought the game already”.

There is one more fascinating aspect of Milk Race’s success which that Commodore User review highlights. Buciek wrote that “This game’s got about as much shelf life as a pint of milk. After all, by the time you read this, the Milk Race will have come and gone in a blur of bike pedals.” Milk Race was released to tie in with the real life race in May 1987. It reached an initial chart peak of #2 soon after the race ended, and started to fall as you might expect. But then in August it climbed once more, all the way to #1 for three weeks, months after the race had finished.

  • Milk Race (Mastertronic, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Milk Race (Mastertronic, 1987, Commodore 64)

This seemed to make no sense, unless the game got much more positive word of mouth than its reviews would suggest. Then I looked into a passing reference in a modern review of Milk Race to a similar game released the following year, CRL’s Kellogg’s Tour, and a more likely explanation emerged. Kellogg’s had been sponsoring cycling events for a while before 1987, but that year it and its partners got more ambitious. They successfully launched their own Kellogg’s pro Tour of Britain as a rival to the pro-am Milk Race.

It turns out that Milk Race’s trip to the top of the charts in August 1987 lined up perfectly with the running of the inaugural Kellogg’s Tour and its attendant publicity. It appears that many people wanted to play a cycling game after seeing a cycling tour event, and it didn’t really matter whether the game was based on the same cycling tour event. The breakfast-cereal-based synergy at work meant that any successful promotion of this new tour’s sponsor presumably helped the old tour’s sponsor, too. Whether or not Milk Race’s makers foresaw their August boost, it was a triumph for Mastertronic, for Icon Design, and for the Milk Marketing Board. 

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 08 August 1987, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 22 August 1987, Popular Computing Weekly

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