Chuckie Egg began as a Saturday boy’s homework. Nigel Alderton was about 15 and worked weekends at A&F Software, serving customers, duplicating tapes and “fetching bacon butties for the programmers”. At home he was writing a Spectrum game of his own, which he called Eggy Kong. When he showed it to one of A&F’s programmers, he recalled, “Suddenly he was talking to me on a level.” A&F renamed it Chuckie Egg and put it out in 1983. By early 1984 it was on the Spectrum, BBC Micro, Electron and Dragon, and in the following years it reached almost every home computer in Britain. It was the game that made the company.
Hen-House Harry’s job
The player is Hen-House Harry, a small figure in a wide-brimmed hat. CRASH thought he looked like “a little yellow — well chicken it looks like, but probably a li’l ’ol farmer boy”. Each screen is a hen-house of platforms, ladders and, later, lifts, with eggs to collect and piles of corn to eat for extra points. A&F’s own advertisement put it simply: “You have to collect 12 eggs and corn to finish the screen — but watch out, there are some nasty ducklings chasing you!”
The birds walk the platforms, climb the ladders, eat the corn and kill on contact. Nobody could agree what they were. CRASH called them chickens, Sinclair User “giant ducks”, and Elbug “stork-like birds”. Doug Anderson, who wrote the BBC version, later explained that “they were meant to be hens but they looked more like ostriches”, and many players still call them ostriches.
There are eight screens. Harry starts with five lives and gains one for every 10,000 points, and a time limit runs on every screen. Personal Computer Games noted that the layouts grow more complicated as you go, “with moving platforms, ladders going nowhere and eggs hovering mysteriously in mid-air”.
Then the game loops, and changes. A 15-year-old reader wrote to Sinclair User in March 1984 to say that “at level nine the duck is released from its cage”, and from then on a big flying duck hunts Harry as well. Anderson described the rest of the design to Edge: “The second time around the duck came out of the cage. It would dive-bomb you all the time. On the third time the hens walked at double speed and then on the fourth time, if you got that far, you got the fast hens and the duck.” There was no end screen. “We expected people just to play until they got fed up with it, but people kept playing it and scoring millions. We were flabbergasted really.”
How it felt to play
What players remember is the movement. Reviewers praised the controls from the start: CRASH’s reviewer found the keys “highly responsive, your man jumping beautifully, even reversing direction in mid-jump if you time it right”. Harry can jump onto the middle of a ladder and grab it, which made escapes from a bird possible at the last moment. Edge singled that out in 2002, arguing that even Manic Miner “was inferior to Chuckie Egg in this respect”.
Anderson told Edge that the hardest part was the landings. “The thing that took me the longest was trying to get the landing on the platforms right.” Harry falls off a ledge in an arc instead of dropping straight down, which “gave the impression that there were real physical laws in there”.
The ladders took practice. Sinclair User’s reviewer found it “difficult to get on or off the ladders unless you are in the proper position”. A reader replied in the next issue that the answer was to hold the up key while running past a ladder.
Two programmers, one game
The two men involved tell the start slightly differently. Alderton told Retro Gamer in 2007 that he had already coded five of the eight screen layouts before he took the game to A&F, although the company saw only the first level that day because the code to finish a level did not yet work. His inspirations were two arcade games, Donkey Kong and Space Panic. “At the time my favourite game was Space Panic, so Chuckie Egg is really Space Panic 2.” He made it “more about dexterity than problem solving”, because he “wasn’t a big fan of Manic Miner-style puzzles”.
Doug Anderson, who had founded A&F with Mike Fitzgerald in 1981, told Edge that Alderton “came to us with a Spectrum program he’d done called Eggy Kong. It had one level and was very much based on Donkey Kong.” Anderson was a BBC programmer and wrote the BBC Micro version, while Alderton finished the Spectrum one at the same time; “we worked on it as a team and there were a few people chipping in ideas”, Anderson said. Both accounts agree that the Spectrum and BBC games were written side by side, which is why they differ in small ways: Retro Gamer found that the speed of Harry’s jump, the lifts and the birds differ between the two, and that the eggs on screen eight are laid out differently.
The period press credited both. CRASH‘s Spectrum review named the author as “N. Alderton”, while Personal Computer Games introduced Anderson in November 1984 as “the man responsible for Chuckie Egg” and had him play it on the BBC at its programmers’ shoot-out.
Reviews and charts
The first reviews were warm. Personal Computer Games made it a “PCG Hit” in March 1984, scoring it 8 out of 10 overall and 10 for ease of use, because A&F let players choose their own movement keys. It thought the BBC version had the best graphics and called the game “easy enough for kids and compulsive enough for adults”. CRASH, in its second issue the same month, gave the Spectrum version 80% and wrote that A&F had “added to the mythology of the Platform Game”; its one complaint was the price.
The price depended on whom you asked. A&F’s advertisement in the same issue of CRASH asked £6.90 for the Spectrum version, while the review gave £7.90; Personal Computer Games listed £7.90, or £6.90 on the Spectrum. The BBC and Electron versions sold at £7.90.
By the summer of 1984 it was in both main British charts. Acorn User’s top 20 for July placed it seventh, and CRASH’s readers voted it eighth among Spectrum games in August. A year later CRASH said it had “consistently ridden high in the CRASH hotline charts”.
On every machine
A&F made its own tapes. Anderson remembered “our own little factory unit” with “banks of cassette decks”, and told Edge that a tape cost about 50p to make and sold for five or six pounds, of which the company kept about 40 per cent after VAT and the distributors. The game “never made a huge amount but it was a good steady earner for quite a long time because we kept putting it out on different machines: the Commodore and the Amstrad and the Dragon”. Retro Gamer lists conversions for the Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Electron, MSX, Amstrad CPC and Tatung Einstein, none of them by Alderton, who thought “the BBC version is probably the slickest, but I prefer my Spectrum original!”
The sequel, Chuckie Egg 2 (1985), was a different game: 120 linked screens in which Harry runs A&F’s chocolate egg factory. CRASH called it “a worthy successor”, but Alderton had no part in it and disliked its “design-by-committee”. He had been a freelancer for A&F and had already left to work for Ocean on Kong Strikes Back; he later co-wrote the Spectrum Commando.
A&F went out of business in 1985, according to both Edge and Retro Gamer. The game outlived it. In 1989 a Manchester company, Pick & Choose, advertised Chuckie Egg and its sequel for the Atari ST and Amiga alongside versions for the Spectrum, Commodore, Amstrad, Atari, MSX, Dragon, BBC and Electron, with a PC version “soon”. Since then fans have kept it going with websites and remakes, which Alderton called “incredible and very flattering”.
Sources
- Your Computer, December 1983, p. 245: A&F Software advertisement (Chuckie Egg £6.90; the Rochdale address).
- Electron User volume 1 issue 3, December 1983, p. 3: news of A&F’s Electron titles.
- Sinclair User issue 22, January 1984, p. 42: Spectrum review (“giant ducks”, the ladders, £6.90). Issue 24, March 1984, p. 27: letter from Anthony Webster (five lives, an extra life for each 10,000, the duck released at level nine, the up key on ladders).
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984, p. 14: review (author “N. Alderton”, £7.90, the controls, 80% overall, “almost £8 — the one drawback”); p. 35: A&F advertisement (£6.90, “12 eggs and corn”, “nasty ducklings”). Issue 7, August 1984, p. 79: readers’ chart. Issue 17, June 1985, p. 12: Chuckie Egg 2 review (120 screens, “a worthy successor”, the hotline charts).
- Personal Computer Games issue 4, March 1984, p. 62: review, “PCG Hit” (BBC, Dragon and Spectrum; £7.90, Spectrum £6.90; eight screens, five lives, the time limit; scores). Issue 12, November 1984, p. 96: the programmers’ shoot-out (Doug Anderson, age 28, “the man responsible for Chuckie Egg”).
- Elbug volume 1 issue 7, June 1984, p. 15: Electron review by David A. Fell (£7.90, “stork-like birds”, the grain).
- Acorn User issue 24, July 1984, p. 163: top 20 software chart (Chuckie Egg seventh, £7.90, BBC and Electron).
- The Games Machine issue 18, May 1989, p. 52: Pick & Choose advertisement (the formats).
- Edge issue 109, April 2002, pp. 84–86: “The making of… Chuckie Egg”, interview with Doug Anderson (A&F founded in 1981 with Mike Fitzgerald; Eggy Kong; “more like ostriches”; the loops and the duck; the arc of a fall; duplication costs; A&F’s closure in 1985).
- Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, pp. 88–91: Kim Wild, “The Making of Chuckie Egg”, interview with Nigel Alderton (the Saturday job, Eggy Kong, Space Panic, the five screens, the differences between the versions, the conversions, Chuckie Egg 2, Ocean and Kong Strikes Back, A&F’s closure in 1985, the remakes).