We asked Nigel Alderton, creator of Chuckie Egg, to tell us a little bit about how the game came into being. Here's what he told us, all these years later:

Q. How did you first come to write Chuckie Egg?

I was totally addicted to arcade games. A newsagent near school had a series of classic machines, one after the other, including Scramble and Donkey Kong. For a while I went there every day on the way to school, on the way home, during lunch hour, during breaks, on the way from lesson-to-lesson if I could get away with it. I'd already written a game for the Speccy called Blaster - a cross between Scramble and Defender that scrolled horizontally but all the movement was a character at a time. What I really wanted to do was a game where things moved smoothly, pixel by pixel. There were very few games with smooth movement (I even remember reading in a magazine some "expert" stating that pixel movement wasn't possible in the Speccy because of the way the screen was mapped), so I started to develop code for pixel movement and think about ideas for a game.

Q. What was your original inspiration?

Chuckie Egg is a cross between two of my favourite platform arcade games at the time, Donkey Kong and the rather more obscure Space Panic. I just took the bits I liked best from each game and added a few ideas of my own.

Q. What did you imagine the game would be like when you started?

The game was 95 percent designed in my head very early in the coding process and 100 percent designed by half way through coding, so what you see is pretty much as I had imagined it at the start.

Q. Had you written any games before? If so, what were they?

Just one called Blaster. It was all hand-coded, i.e. I would write a routine in assembler, look up the corresponding machine code for each instruction and write it next to the assembler. 'POKE' the numbers into memory, test it. Thinking back I'm amazed that I had the patience.

Q. Why do you think Chuckie Egg was so much fun? What did you do consciously to make it especially fun? How much was blind luck?

I didn't design by thinking about what other people would like. I just created the sort of game that I would enjoy playing myself. The great thing about writing you own game is obviously that you get to decide exactly what goes in and what doesn't. I was creating my own little world, so without really thinking about what I was doing. I automatically created a world that I would enjoy spending time in.

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(continued in the book)