Long lost Internet game has driven me udderly insane
Milking cows, pixelated viscera and a shotgun
All I want is to milk some bloody cows.
The past few weeks of my life have been consumed trying to track down an old online game that gobbled up hours of my life back in the early 2000s.
It was called Udder Insanity, released around 1999, and my quest to find it in the ether of the Internet is driving me batty.
The premise was simple: milk all the cows before their udders exploded.
You used the arrow keys along your ever- growing herd of cows. You had to dump your milk and quickly get back to milking before your ever- expanding cartoon cows burst, one by one, leaving a splattering of blood and milk dripping down your screen.
That wasn’ t the only threat: A local boy would try to tip your cattle on occasion, and you had to rush your farmer avatar over to the waiting shotgun in the corner of the screen to shoot the pesky twit — often costing you precious milking time at key moments.
When you failed, it was a spectacular display of pixelated viscera as your cows burst apart or rotted on their backs from being tipped.
Over the years I have kept trying to find the game, only to keep ending up on phishing websites that promise me a return to 2001, but are really just trying to mine my data and credit card information.
Nothing quite stacks up to Udder Insanity.
I’ ve found cheap knock offs — a British version called Milk Panic that has similar game play. Another game, called Udder Chaos, briefly raised my hopes. Instead of the dairy delights I was seeking, it offered a slingshot and eggs to shoot down farm animals, that, for some reason, were parachuting out of the sky.
And they weren’t even to scale: tiny chickens were the same size as pigs.
Udder Insanity might have been crude and gross, but at least it tried to follow scale and basic logic.
My trail of false starts and 404s left me disheartened. The sadness only deepened when I found reviews from recent years and evidence that a college campus in the United States held an Udder Insanity tournament in 2015.
In 2001, I probably could have taken the cup.