Milk declares itself the "official performance drink of gamers"

Mario drinks milk — (Image credit: Nintendo/MilkPEP (via Genkisan on YouTube))

Milk - yes, the dairy milk you might purchase from your local grocery store - is getting into games by sponsoring TwitchCon and declaring itself the "official performance drink of gamers."

You can find 'Gonna Need Milk' listed among the presenting sponsors for TwitchCon, a streamer-focused convention set to kick off on Friday, October 7. "This year, milk becomes the official performance drink of gamers," the official description says, "recognizing gaming as sport and gamers as athletes."

Milk will present a TwitchCon "activation" - that's marketer's speak for "thing" - called How Fast Are You, which will test "gamers physical and mental performance with an epic head-to-head competition." I don't really know what that means, but milk promises that "everyone can enjoy some chocolate milk and limited edition swag," and "the competitor with the fastest hands will earn the grand prize trophy created by a Twitch artist."

So yes, you can throw out your Mountain Dews, your Monster Energy drinks, and even good old H2O - milk is here to quench your gaming thirst. The gaming fridge you definitely have as part of your gaming setup should now be stocked with moo juice and nothing else - unless you don't care about your performance, that is.

You may be wondering - like I was - exactly how milk can declare itself the official drink of gamers. The Gonna Need Milk campaign is the product of MilkPEP, a marketing organization funded by American milk companies. If you know MilkPEP from anything, it's the 'Got Milk?' campaign that was pretty much inescapable in the US throughout the 90s and 2000s. There were even Got Milk? ads featuring Mario, to really tie all this neatly together.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.