#tbt – How to Beat the Tour de France Game (June 2009)
Back in 2009, your only cycling video game options were an old NES game, an old DOS game, an Xbox game in which your rider would fall through the ground, and Pro Cycling Manager. A decade later, that’s all changed: they’ve added a new PS4 game in which the ground falls up into your rider.
An accurate game of the 2009 Tour de France needed more media options and cynicism than then-current games could offer, and it also needed to be made in MS-DOS for some reason. All as imagined by a bored idiot who needed a distraction from writing benign Tour de France content designed to appeal to the tedious strangers who talk at you about the charity ride they did on their Diamondbacks when you find yourself forced to sit next to them at barbecues.
By now, you’ll probably be sick of hearing how tough the Tour is, how it demands 25,000 calories a day and reduces the life expectancy of a pro cyclist to somewhere below that of a sparrow. But it’s not hard, you’re just doing it wrong. Here’s our guide to winning the Tour de France.
Uh, if it was a video game we mean.
This is the title screen. For now we’ll select “Game Start”. There’s no point entering a Cheat Code—unless you ride for a big team, cheating means there’s a small chance the game will randomly eliminate you and ban you from playing for two years.
Now you have to select your player. Whoever you get your hopes up for will slip backwards through the peloton on the first uphill or suspiciously quit the race out of the blue. Whoever excites you and finally makes you feel passionate about the sport again will be banned for doping. The trick is to select the least interesting, most uninspiring rider and stifle your tears.
This is the “Race Screen”, where much of the action takes place. Whatever you do, DO NOT click the “Attack” button. Ride defensively and wait for your rivals to lose. Unless you’re a completionist, you can skip the first week altogether.
This is your PR manager. He’ll advise you on what to do to get your name fondly dropped by David “Harriet” Harmon live on Eurosport every few minutes. Tactics include bumping into commentators over breakfast, paying for journalists to fly to your exotic training camp, and completely bombarding the media with some bullshit stories that’ll endear your white Anglo-Saxon arse ass to profitable territories. Cycling is a mediasport; you can’t achieve success without first becoming part of the symbiont.
Congratulations, you’ve won. The magazines are raising their bottoms in the air in the hope of persuading you to do an interview, the bloggers are writing bratty, solipsistic evaluations of how you performed, and the fans are quietly swallowing their disappointment and switching the channel over to the Moto GP coverage.