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MeIf you played home video games in the early 1980s, you knew about Chuckie Egg. There is no question. This seemingly simple platform game had you running around the coop, collecting eggs and avoiding the patrolling chickens. But when you got to the eighth level, a big duck was suddenly released and watched the player like a feathered missile, completely changing the pace and tactics of the game. It was a boss battle before there were boss battles.
Everyone knows about Chuckie Egg because everyone can play it. Originally released on the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro and Dragon 32 in the fall of 1983, it immediately topped the charts, prompting its publisher, A&F Software, to begin porting it to as many machines as possible. At least 11 versions followed, including the Commodore 64, Amstrad and Acorn Electron. I first played it on the BBC computer in my school library, but I also had it on my C64 and a friend played it on his Speccy. Like Manic Miner, Bruce Lee and Skool Daze, it was woven into the art of British 8-bit gaming.
Like many games of this era, it had a humble beginning. A&F Software was not a global corporation. It was run by two friends, Doug Anderson and Mike Fitzgerald, out of their computer shop in Denton, Greater Manchester. Upstairs they had a room full of tape recorders on which they made copies of their games, many of which were created by a small team of programmers who worked out of the back room. The Chuckie Egg was created by 15-year-old Saturday employee, Nigel Alderton.
Alderton first discovered computers when his school’s math teacher managed to get the money to buy two TRS-80 machines, and he was immediately fascinated. He said: “I used to go around trying to find time to spend with them, but there was no problem. “You had to be late for school or get there early!”
After this, his parents bought him a ZX81 for his birthday and later a ZX Spectrum. He said: “I remember seeing pictures of it in magazines. It had colorful pictures, sound, and a better keyboard. However, it was more expensive, so I think it was a Christmas and birthday present together and I paid for half of it.”
He had already taught himself to program in machine learning on the ZX81 – a much faster language than Basic – and created his first Spectrum game, Rabbit Run, with a neighbor (“We tried to sell ourselves by placing an ad in a sports magazine. I think we sold one copy”). Then came Rocket Raider, a perfect combination of Defender and Scramble.
The inspiration for Chuckie Egg did not come from other computer games, but from the big money of the time. “It was two buses to get home from my work on Saturday, and the bus station where I stopped in the middle of the street had a playground across the street. They played Donkey Kong, Nintendo’s formative classic, but their favorite was Space Panic, which they played before, where the players had to look at the screen through the ladders, dig holes to trap the incoming guests before hitting them with a shovel. All the while, the timer ticked down and when it hit zero, the leader disappeared. breath and die.
Alderton was so impressed that he started making his own. “If you put a Space Panic poster next to a Chuckie Egg they look embarrassingly similar,” he says. “The colors are the same. I took everything from Space Panic that I liked and other platform games and ladders.” When he showed the game to other coders that happened immediately. “They were really impressed – I was this little kid making cups of tea! Afterwards there was a group of programmers around the screen, the bosses came down. It was really fun.”
At this time, Alderton had no story or place to act. “In my mind, it was the tall birds flying around on the platforms, and then the flappy bird at the top.
As was the case at the time, the visual interface emerged from the limitations of the hardware. “I wanted the enemies to be two characters high and one character wide, and it depended on how they looked. You had to keep that — you didn’t want a complicated look.” When it came to writing the blurb for the cassette tapes, it was A&F that came up with the idea of the hen house and the name of the lead, Hen House Harry.
It was related to home video games of the time, such as Hungry Horace and Manic Miner. But one of the things everyone loved about the game was its water. Rotating the screen feels difficult but natural, allowing you to move smoothly. Like Shigeru Miyamoto and Super Mario Bros., most of the development was getting the character movement right. “I spent a lot of time driving speed – not fast, not slow.” I remember the character flying at one point, but I kept repeating and repeating, slowing down. Bird speed is designed for you just run after them. And the jump height should be long enough that it is a useful skill, but not so long that you can jump everywhere. After playing all of these games in the arcade, I can only feel how satisfying it can be to play. “
The faster you complete each level, the higher your score, so there was a reason to come back – unlike other computer platformers like Manic Miner, which were like puzzle tours.
“I like games based on skill, where there are many ways to win.” Chuckie Egg was all about creativity… I wanted to make a game where he continued to evolve – it wasn’t just about getting faster and faster,” says Alderton. I wish I had taken a break to run on empty for a little while before the duck got out of its cage!
Alderton continued to work in games for several years, moving to Ocean to co-write the TV tie-in Street Hawk, then to Elite Systems to develop the Arcade Commando and Ghosts ‘n Goblins characters. However, the length and scope of the game grew too much, and he left the job soon after.
But Chuckie Egg never left. This month, veteran publisher Elite Systems announced a new smartphone model with 3D graphics. “It’s one of the few games from the first half of the ’80s that people still think about and talk about,” says Steve Wilcox co-founder of Elite Systems. “Having watched the game so many times over the last 20 or 25 years, including this version, I think the one thing I get out of it is that you just feel like you’re playing.”
Alderton now has a very diverse, global corporate forecasting service. But the game did not leave him alone. “I had a guy come in to fix the furnace and he saw that I had on a Chuckie Egg T-shirt that my friends had made for me.” He said, ‘Oh, I remember Chuckie Egg’, and I told him I wrote it – he couldn’t believe it.
