Skateboarding and platforming shouldn’t mix.
OlliOlli World, the superb new game from Roll7, is a transcendental adventure in which the player gradually masters the four pillars of skateboarding — grinds, flips, manuals and tricks — to become the Last Airbender of skaters. It’s a bleary-eyed, grin-inducing, marshmallowy vaporwave world, so there’s no broken ankles or nut-shots. You’re a cartoon living in a consequence-free environment run on nothing but good vibes. It is, in short, an unparalleled delight to cruise around in OlliOlli World.
Back in the nineties, however, a (possibly very small) cross-section of Aussie kids pining for skateboarding prowess were exposed to another platformer. One in which you skate your way through a series of worlds, gradually learning tricks. One decidedly less chill.
That game was Milo’s The Fuel Run.
No, this isn’t some kind of elaborate joke. In 1997, Milo made a deal with its consumers. Send in a few labels, and a couple of bucks, and they’d mail you a CD-ROM containing a platformer in which you played a blonde-haired skater named Max. All the Milo in the world is being stolen away by mysterious forces and it’s up to you and Max to solve the case. Developed by Harrow Software (and I could not, for the life of me, find a trace of said company online, nor anyone who worked for them), it’s basically a side-scrolling platformer in which you’re on the board the entire time.
As any skater worth their salt will tell you, you have to get off the board. You know, to push. And live. If our protagonist in The Fuel Run is indeed fastened to his board at all times, he’s a snowboarder. And whilst later in the game he does, indeed, hop onto a snowboard, what’s good for one is not necessarily good for the other.
Realism aside, The Fuel Run was a watershed moment for me and my mates. We grabbed boards and attempted to skate in real life, a short-lived phase in which many bones were, if not broken, then at least significantly compromised. The game, however, continued to play in high rotation. The gradual addition of new tricks meant before long, you were adding ollie grabs to add height, grinds to traverse, and eventually, you folded all of these tricks into your platforming repertoire.
So when playing OlliOlli World, I had a nagging sensation that I’d done this before. Not nearly as well, of course — OlliOlli World has an almost effortless level of polish, and The Fuel Run plays like a demented flash game — but still, it felt like it shared the same DNA.
The Tony Hawk games became huge, of course, but we lucky few — we absolute nerds willing to consume Milo by the vat and mail off coupons — clung to the true faith. Skating games, we believed, had to be side-scrollers. How else could you enjoy pulling off a trick, if not viewing them from the side? Every few years, the Tony Hawk series would step things up a notch — I thoroughly enjoyed Tony Hawk Underground, given that it let you design your own character and dress them up in a variety of skating attire. Plus, it had a degree of free-roam and a storyline. But guess what? That’s exactly what OlliOlli World has. It’s like Roll7 cast about and integrated everything in skating games that absolute dorks like me love: customisation, progression, platforming, and hats. Lots of hats.
There’s a kind of pastel nineties nostalgia infused into OlliOlli World which harkens back to The Fuel Run’s brief, questionable moment in the spotlight, too. The thing most people don’t know is that, like the metal community, skaters dress and act tough but are, by and large, absolute sweethearts. There’s a freewheeling gentleness in the heart of most skaters, and the overarching vibe of rolling around and working in sync with the environment around you has an inherent groove to it.
Coupled with the fashion in the game (most of the clothing you add to your collection has a very breezy California beach vibe to it) and the dreamy soundtrack paired with the Saturday morning cartoon animation style, it’s… transportative. It feels like we‘re back in the era of Clueless, Liquid Television, and Cheez TV. Sure, it doesn’t have the undeniably Australian jank of The Fuel Run (nor does feature any tins of Milo). But it makes you feel like a kid, with no responsibilities, no worries, and only the open rail ahead of you.
You can still play The Fuel Run online, incidentally. It doesn’t run perfectly, and you won’t get the satisfaction of sending away for it, but it’s well worth a dive. The sheer audacity of Nestle (a company whose human rights violations alone have driven me away from Milo for years now — they are, at present, still attempting to mitigate the fallout from a literal child slavery lawsuit) to allow Milo to make an honest to god video game tie-in is staggering. But if you want to experience that same rush again, if you played The Fuel Run and have spent years trying to scratch that itch, OlliOlli World has you covered.
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