Amid the madness of Gamescom, we somehow skipped the most important game of the year. Cheese Rolling is a multiplayer ragdoll game inspired by the ancient Gloucestershire, England pastime of racing a hunk of dairy down a hill.
The hill in question is Cooper’s Hill at Brockworth, and the ceremony apparently dates back to at least 1826 – providing you trust the account of that year’s Gloucester town crier – which makes the sport of cheese rolling at least 47 years older than Rock Paper Shotgun. The cheese in question is usually Double Gloucester – scandalously, they resorted to a foam replica in 2013 – and is given a strict one-second headstart.
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I hadn’t heard of Cheese Racing before, but I do have relatives down Gloucestershire way, and now I fear for them. I’m not just saying that because I’m vegan, though yes, I’m tempted to go sabotage the festivities by stealing into what I assume is a closely-guarded tent at night, and replacing the wheel with a large ball of tempeh. But mostly I am concerned for their physical safety and moral wellbeing.
Apparently, four kilograms of cheese can do a royal fuckload of damage when it achieves maximum velocity. 16 people were injured during the 1993 event, says Wikipedia, “four of them seriously”. What. Also, Wikipedia claims that nobody has ever caught the cheese, at least in recorded history. The winner is whoever crosses the finishing line second. So this is just a regular old race, in practice, with a wholly unnecessary and patently unsafe fermented milk modifier.
The official title for the event is “Cheese-Rolling and Wake”, and while local historians insist they don’t mean “wake” as in “funeral”, you do have to wonder if this is the distorted folk memory of a terrible accident at a hilltop dairy. Kind of like how “London’s burning, London’s burning” is now a charming nursery rhyme.
I’m going to contact the organisers and suggest they play the Steam version of Cheese Racing instead. Created by mercurial developer The Interviewed – their very name a brainlocking allusion to a history of media relations that does not, seemingly, exist – it’s more dangerous than traditional Gloucestershire cheese-rolling in that it features an active volcano, but less dangerous in that it is not real. No bones will be broken hounding this cheese, unless you try to play it while driving a bus. Also, it supports eight player sessions and proximity voice chat. There’s some paid DLC in the shape of a suit of armour costing £1.48 – as far as I can deduce, this isn’t some kind of scam, but tread cautiously, ye who fell foul of the evil Banana.
The real selling point, though, is that you can actually catch the renegade curd in this one. My friends in Gloucestershire: thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you need no longer harm and humiliate yourselves in your hunger for dairy. Here is a computer. Behold, there is cheese in the computer! Now all you have to do is roll the cheese down the hill – no wait, not the ACTUAL COMPUTER