Welcome to The Chuckie Egg Professional's Resource Kit, a site dedicated to a game which reached the absolute pinnacle of platformers during the 1980s.

Chuckie Egg - A game of skill for 1 to 4 players

Who'd have thought a country farmyard could be so stressful? Guide your man, Hen House Harry, around his hen house to pick up a dozen eggs on each level. Collect as much corn from each screen as you can (for bonus points), in the shortest possible time, without being pecked to death by the crazy hens. Watch out when the daft mother duck is let loose from the cage on level 9, causing Harry real trouble. You control your man using four direction keys and a jump key.

Harry starts with five lives, but an extra life is awarded every 10,000 points.

FAQ - I need a Chuckie Egg fix, right NOW! Where do I go?!

"Just let me try and beat this ***** bird     PLEASE !!!!!!!!!"
Jim of Harrogate north-yorks , uk

Big up the 'egg!
"One of my very first memories is playing this game of sheer brilliance. Big up the 'egg!"
Lloyd 12:28 28 Nov 2000

Scrambled Eggs
"I used to play this game when I was supposed to be doing my homework,now I'm playing it when I'm supposed to be working nearly 15 years later! Life is just one big wheel and Chuckie Egg is the blinding white centre!"
Mike 11:18 3 Apr 2001

GamesDomain: The Ian Bell Interview
"... my favourite game ever is "Chuckie Egg" on the BBC. I can't remember who wrote it and technically it was poor but it was such fun to play once you knew what you were doing."
Ian Bell (co-author of the legendary Elite) Aug 1995

Stairway To Hell software: games forum :: The best BBC game ever? topic
"Chuckie Egg still just about takes the biscuit as the most playable game ever anywhere on anything. Graphics weren't too hot, animation poor, sound and music OK but the thing played like a dream."
Peter Scott (prolific BBC micro coder, conversion master and author of Audiogenic's Thunderstruck trilogy) 21 Feb 2007

 
 

29/06/2008 - Added another unofficial Chuckie Egg T-shirt, this time from revolution-shirtz, to the Merchandise page, along with a men's sleeveless tee from RetroGamer.

16/06/2008 - Added three really cool 3D desktop wallpapers to the Downloads page, courtesy of talented visitor Martin Bastable.

26/02/2008 - Added a scan of The Micro User free CE offer for subscribers to the Adverts page and modified the History page to include it. Also added references to The Making Of... Chuckie Egg article, published in last August's Retro Gamer magazine, to the Authors and Press pages, as well as the newly-expanded History page. Updated Retro Remakes pages with some info on the development of Mike Elson's classic DirectX Chuckie Egg remake.

25/02/2008 - As you probably well know, we've been back for a while. Apologies for the longer-than-anticipated downtime which was due to our beloved national telecoms company, who managed to mess up our internet connection. Anyway, we're back now and have added a DOS remake released last year, Chuckie Eggs the remake for PC by Jozsef 'Joco' Laszlo as well as a SPECTRUM 48K CE review by Eurogamer to the Press page. Neil Crutchlow has also announced, due to popular demand, the addition of a new section where you can register and compare your score/level achievements with other users of his Flash port of Chuckie Egg, see how far you got prevously and level skip to get back there. Finally, there's a small promotional image update to the J2ME page. There's still some more bits to tidy up after our absence, so we'll be back soon.

12/08/2007 - OK. The Chuckie Egg Professional's Resource Kit has a temporary new home, courtesy of the fantabulous Venura, whilst we're moving Chuckie Egg Towers to better quarters on campus. This might take a couple of months, and unfortunately the dynamic comment (forums, polls etc.) will be disabled until we get back. No updates for a while, but we have some plans for when we get back! See you shortly.

17/06/2007 - Added a new story to the History page, courtesy of Sean Townsend. Added new quotation from Peter Scott to front page.

01/06/2007 - The Message Board and Polls are finally working again! Added some links to the History page, updated the GP2X and J2ME MIDP2.0 retro remake entries and added a new retro review to the Press page - the May issue of the re-launched Retro Gamer magazine saw Chuckie Egg come in at number 8 in the top 25 platformers of all time, as voted for by Retro Gamer readers. The front page has now gone Web 2.0 with a Youtube video (animated gif moved to downloads page) and, finally, what do you get if you cross a BBC Model B and a brand new Epson LCD projector? Chuckie Egg as nature intended!

31/05/2007 - WARNING!!! It's been brought to our attention that there is a new website on the block. Unfortunately, it looks like chuckie-egg.co.uk has been setup with the sole purpose of illegally re-selling Mike Elson's Chuckie Egg for Windows which is, of course, still freely available. If this is the case, this is a breach of both the original copyright, as well as a blatant cash-in on Mike's hard work. We recommend you do NOT purchase Chuckie Egg for the PC from either this site, or from any of the dubious eBay sellers who appear to be offering the same thing on Buy It Now. If you have already purchased CE in either of these ways, get in touch and let us know if it really is Mike Elson's version, as the screenshots imply.

30/05/2007 - Finally got round to updating the Advertisements page - added some better quality scans and more ads.

20/05/2007 - OK, it's been far too long, but we have a number of updates coming over the next few days. We'll start with news that Alan Gorton aka Gunston has been in touch, to provide us with a sneak YouTube preview of his upcoming Chuckie X release, a Microsoft XNA clone of Chuckie Egg, for Windows and the X-Box 360! According to Alan, the graphics are faithful but scaled up slightly for HD screens and he intends to provide the source code too. It's looking pretty awesome, already ... Alan's Chuckie Egg history goes back somewhat further than this release, however - his brother was also an old school-mate of Sean Townsend. It's a small world ...

There's also been an error correction on the Acorn Electron entry, and lots of information on A&F's war on software piracy added to the History, as well as some further info on Mike Webb, who we've apparently lost touch with since his initial contact. :/ Mike, if you ever pop back here, please try getting in touch again!

On better news, guess who else also got in touch? Sean Townsend ... :) Check out our email interview with the C64 CE guru.

30/10/2006 - Well, it's taken over seven months ;) but James 'hamster' Ryan has finally dug out the hi-res version of his COMMODORE CM64 Map which was three years old when we first heard about it! Anyway, we're glad to welcome it to a permanent home, where it's already settled in and has replaced the lo-res version on the Game Play page. Thanks, James - that just leaves the Amstrad, Amiga and Atari ST versions left to be mapped ... anyone? :)

21/10/2006 - Thanks go to Jo of relative newcomer site BBC educational games, for providing two different releases of BBC 32K CE cassettes. We're steadily building up a complete collection and will eventually include packaging scans for all CE releases. Many thanks for the donation!

01/10/2006 - Added info on Neil Crutchlow's GP2X remake of the BBC 32K release of Chuckie Egg.

12/08/2006 - Added a cover scan for Space Panic to the A&F Releases page and a link to Kevin Adam's Cash Dash, a new set of custom graphics for Mike Elson's DirectX Chuckie Egg. Also added CPC Oxygen to the Links page.

11/08/2006 - Finally! Our second world exclusive - the recently unearthed design for the unreleased sequel to Chuckie Egg, from the original Spectrum author Nigel Alderton. If that wasn't enough, we're also celebrating the scoop with the launch of a competition to anyone foolhardy enough to implement it!

21/06/2006 - Added info on Neil Crutchlow's Flash port of the BBC 32K release of Chuckie Egg.

22/05/2006 - Michael Foot has announced on usenet that a new update to his Chuckie Egg for RISC OS is available courtesy of Alan Buckley, which adds support for RISC OS 5.xx and the higher resolution screen modes on the Iyonix as well as adding the option to use outline fonts for the text. This new 1.04 version will still run on older Acorn hardware as well but requires RISC OS 3.6 or above.

05/05/2006 - MESS 0.104b added support for the Acorn Electron so it's now possible to run the Electron release of Chuckie Egg natively, instead of loading it into the BBC Micro driver.

28/04/2006 - Added more info to the entry on Egg - The Upgrade on the Hacks and Upgrades page.

24/04/2006 - Added limited information to a new page on the CE2 Launch Competition. Contact us, if you can share more info!

23/04/2006 - Added a new t-shirt to the Merchandise page, links to a C64 emulator to play CE and CE2 online and links to the homepages of a couple of the authors listed on the Hacks and Upgrades page. Updated site and Resource Kit with Electron User Group EUG #21, July 1995 cheat.

19/04/2006 - Here's a cool link - in 2001, Chuckie Egg was the subject of a scientific study into the effectiveness of emulation as a digital preservation strategy.

17/04/2006 - Happy Easter! A special treat for all you CE fans - Rob Edwards has released his own Chuckie Egg Remake.

13/04/2006 - Added a new t-shirt to the Merchandise page.

09/04/2006 - Added more information on two Spectrum CE editors - the CHUCKIE EGG EDITOR from Daniel Smith, Mercury Software and the Chuckie Egg Editor Pack from Mulder to Hacks and Upgrades.

05/04/2006 - Another update, another missing Chuckie Egg file. This time it's Ian Price's Div Chuckie Egg which has gone AWOL. It was released to div-arena.com a couple of years ago but is now missing in action. Let us know, if you have any clues.

26/03/2006 - Added couple of new screenshots for Chuckie Designer from P&M Software to Hacks and Upgrades page. Updated Resource Kit with new user-friendly image of BBC 32K extra colours loader disk image, and cleared out duplicate BBC micro disk images.

25/03/2006 - Updated Amstrad cheats and added link to AA issue which included CE on the covermount cassette. Also added AA's CE review to Press page.

19/03/2006 - Updated C64 cheats and added description of known bug for C64 CE 2. Also added C64 CE 2 walkthrough from ZZAP! 64.

22/11/2005 - Some broken links fixed, quotation from Ian Bell added along with more information to the retro remakes page.

30/08/2005 - Added a new response from Nigel Alderton as part of our exclusive interview.

15/08/2005 - Added information on EggStatic, a new OpenGL / DirectX 8 Windows retro remake which was commercially released less than a fortnight ago by Edo Broekman (free demo available with 8 levels & 8 training levels). As well as being crammed with new features, this release is particularly notable as it contains an implementation of the popularly mis-remembered second duck (a hawk, in this remake), that has a different speed and acceleration to the first.

26/06/2005 - Having started with the last Chuckie Egg coder of the 80s, we're going back to the beginning, with the first part of our exclusive interview with the original author of the SPECTRUM 48K release of Chuckie Egg, Nigel Alderton! It's a small start, but hopefully we'll be adding more shortly.

09/06/2005 - After the recent source code scare, Mike Elson renewed development on his Chuckie Egg for Windows remake and has just released the long-anticipated 1.1 version. It's time to upgrade, everyone!

26/04/2005 - The source code for Mike Elson's Chuckie Egg for Windows has been traced, courtesy of tuppe666 of the happypenguin.org forums. We're pleased to announce that Mike will soon be reunited with the source code and it can be expected to be available from his site shortly. Many thanks to all those who got in contact over the past few weeks - your help was greatly appreciated. Hurrah!! Call off the search parties!

14/04/2005 - Mike Elson's DirectX Chuckie Egg site has been relaunched as Chuckie Egg for Windows. Sadly, the source code is still missing (see below).

12/04/2005 - URGENT REQUEST!!! It is with regret that we have to report Mike Elson's DirectX Chuckie Egg site has been lost. The biggest loss, it transpires, has been the DirectX Chuckie Egg source code which may have been lost permanently with the unexpected demise of the site. This site's authors have been in contact with Mike, with the result that most of the rest of the site should soon return at a different site, sans the source code.

MIKE HAS APPEALED TO ANYONE WHO DOWNLOADED THE DIRECTX CHUCKIE EGG SOURCE CODE ZIP FILE WHICH, UNTIL RECENTLY, WAS HOSTED HERE:

      http://www.gershwin.force9.co.uk/chuckie/source/chuckie_source.zip      19-mar-1999 21:01   166k

TO PLEASE EMAIL IT EITHER DIRECTLY TO HIM OR TO THE MAINTAINERS OF THIS SITE.

We're making every effort to trace this file and still have a few irons in the fire but, so far, the outlook is bleak. :(

28/11/2004 - More new coverage for Chuckie Egg as it gets a mention in the recently published PC Action Emulate! special edition magazine.

24/10/2004 - Read their review, as Chuckie Egg reaches number 28 in Retro Gamer magazine's top 100 games as voted for by the readers. Presumably, with a +/-27 margin of error ...

16/10/2004 - Welcome to the first version of the site. Our major exclusive for launch is the official PC (CGA/EGA/TGA) version, created during the days of M.C. Lothlorien, released under the Pick & Choose label and which is now available here for download for the first time ever on the internet (as far as we know)! Somewhat coincidentally, we've also managed to successfully track down the chief coder of that same port, Ste Cork, who we've taken back down memory lane ...