This text adventure's parser, like many of the early examples of interactive fiction, is limited to two words. A simple game, being written in BASIC, the room descriptions are minimal at best, and the storyline - rescuing a beautiful princess from Horror Castle - is pretty unoriginal. This one is hardly likely to challenge the dominance of the classic IF games from Level 9 and Acornsoft, but may be worth a look if you're a fan of the genre.

The lost history of the early development of the original Chuckie Egg is somewhat shrouded in mystery. The foundation is generally attributed to the then 16 or 17 year old Nigel Alderton during a school summer holiday. What is known for sure is that, after a month or two of development, Nigel took a one level pre-release version of his ZX Spectrum 48K code to the two year old Rochdale-based software company A&F, which had made an inauspicious start publishing Acorn Atom titles such as Polecat and Early Warning and early BBC Micro offerings including, in 1982, a release which was widely acknowledged to be a worthy candidate for the worst conversion of Sega's Frogger ever.

With a working title of "Eggy Kong", it demonstrated the clear influence of Nintendo's popular arcade hit Donkey Kong from the start - it can be seen, for example, that level eight of Chuckie Egg bears an uncanny resemblance to Donkey Kong's last screen, the rivet level. Nigel has also since given the nod to the more obscure Space Panic from Universal as well, which is widely regarded as the first ever game in the platformer genre, although it was Donkey Kong which introduced the ability to jump [see Appendix].

One of Nigel's core objectives was smooth pixel movement instead of the character movement which was more typical at the time. The game was also designed around dexterity and reactions, not puzzle solving, and was intended for up to four players - two more than most similar games. Nigel, it has been said, had a particular thing about his game characters having large hats - this was supposedly to make the 'box collision detection' appear more accurate.

Alongside Nigel's ZX Spectrum 48K version, Doug Anderson (the A in A&F, with partner Mike Fitzgerald), as a BBC Micro programmer, took on the simultaneous development of the BBC 32K release. Doug remembers the three month development process as a team effort with a few people chipping in ideas, whilst Nigel recalls it slightly differently:

"It took about four or five months from starting the design to finishing the coding. Basically it was all my own work. A mate of mine - Phil Berry - was round at my house one day around the time I was designing the later screens and he helped with a couple of the screen layouts - six and seven I think - but apart from that I did the lot. Design, programming, (dodgy) graphics, sound, everything."

Either way, in a few short weeks after seeing "Eggy Kong" for the first time, Anderson had completed his BBC 32K version alongside Nigel's Spectrum version. Nigel has since described being slightly frustrated by the fact that the game was released before he could fit in quite everything he had planned, due to pressure from A&F to get the game on the shelves.

"I'd intended there to be more levels. There would have been a cycle which had two birds chasing you at the same time not one. One bird having half the top speed and acceleration of the other so they didn't get locked together. Then I wanted the game to not to change for a complete cycle so the player would think they had seen all there was to see. On the next cycle, I would have put breaks in one or two ladders and removed one or two ladders from each layout. It doesn't sound like much but I'd noticed that I'd developed a favourite route for completing each layout and assumed others would too. Removing ladders would probably disrupt the players favourite route which if it was done late enough in the game when the player had already put hundreds of hours into the game (on the same eight unchanging layouts) would have had a big impact for a small amount of coding."

In 1983, A&F put the game into production. "We were self published back then," Anderson remembers. "We had our own little factory unit and we had banks of cassette decks and we did our own duplication which included people sticking labels on everything. It cost about 50p to make the tape, we then sold it for five or six pounds. But there was VAT on top of that. The distributors took a bit. I think we got about 40 per cent in the end off the net price. [Chuckie Egg] 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."

Nigel was not a member of A'n'F's staff and continued to develop Spectrum & Amstrad games, joining Ocean for a year working on such titles as Kong Strikes Back. Before joining Ocean, Nigel had been developing a 'MR.DO!' style game on the Spectrum that featured the 'Hen House Harry' character from Chuckie Egg. It was rumoured to be looking really good - with lots of bouncing apples and things. Sadly, it was never finished.

A'n'F, like many software developers in the 1980s, was hit hard when the 8-bit micro bubble burst and blamed large losses on software pirates - some of whom were even found to have broadcast commercial software releases over the radio waves before the Internet was around to be used as a distribution medium. One story even relates how Acorn themselves were discovered using a modified, disk-version of Chuckie Egg - which was only ever available on cassette - on display at one of their Acorn roadshows, without permission. A'n'F took a very hard-line approach to all forms of piracy and were quoted as budgeting £100,000 worth of legal action one year, solely intended to prosecute every pirate they could catch for copyright infringement, whilst simultaneously offering £5,000 to anyone who could help them manufacture copy-proof tapes.

In April 1984, A'n'F cited the sudden increase of sales of Cylon Attack as proof of wide-spread piracy and that high-scoring gamers with pirated copies were purchasing legitimate ones in order to obtain the entry form for the £200 launch competition which ended in March. Sean Townsend remembers that this wasn't the only controversy to surround the competition:

"I do remember ... the competition for Cylon Attack. There was some kind of reward, and a lot of effort had been put in to prevent people cheating, anyhow this young lad comes into the office to collect his reward, but before he could he had to prove to some degree that he was capable of reaching the score he had submitted, which of course he couldn’t, I think A&F did pay out, but they were more interested in how he had overcome the cheat mechanisms than the hi score."

In the same vein, June saw A'n'F report, to The Micro User, of the £20,000 development of a piece of software which was intended to enable an anti-copying device to become 95% effective and scupper the school children and computer clubs they believed to be illegally sharing copies of their software, as well as the professional pirates. Unfortunately, A'n'F's costs continued to mount - perhaps in part because the hardware device that had originally prompted the discussions A'n'F had begun, was snapped up by the Ministry of Defence and an embargo placed on it, forcing A'n'F to evaluate an earlier system from the same manufacturer.

However, in November 1984, the firm's managing director, Mike Fitzgerald, reported to The Micro User magazine that after three months agonising deliberation they were regrettably abandoning in-house development of games for the BBC Micro market, due to software piracy on a massive scale and announced the forth-coming Snarl-Up, companion to the best-sellers Cylon Attack and Chuckie Egg would be the last in-house BBC Micro release.

"It was a sad decision to take" and "regrettable in that the BBC is a fine machine, but unavoidable in view of the financial situation". Fitzgerald explains, "but the pirates are so highly organised on such a massive commercial basis, we really had no choice. It costs us £35,000 to develop and market a new program and we need to sell 22,000 copies to break even. Wholesale piracy is cutting into sales to such an extent we're walking a financial tightrope. We just can't protect our BBC games completely enough against the powerful equipment pirates can buy over the counter these days and use to get into our tapes. I'm not talking about the kids who get together to run off a few copies - that doesn't worry me particularly. It's the big boys who are producing cassettes with up to 30 games on them who are really hurting us." Fitzgerald confirmed that A'n'F hadn't abandoned the BBC Micro completely, and would continue to publish other people's programs on the A&F label. "But our future in-house development will concentrate on the Spectrum and Commodore, with projected heavy support for the MSX and Amstrad systems", he said.

Even without Nigel Alderton in-house, A'n'F continued to release Chuckie Egg ports on various platforms and also proceeded to capitalise on the original's success by releasing a sequel in 1985, the aptly named Chuckie Egg 2 (Choccy Egg), across the three major formats of the time, SPECTRUM 48K, COMMODORE 64 and AMSTRAD. This was received to mixed reviews both critically and commercially - perhaps because it was a complete change of genre from the former. The sequel had Harry called in to help run a chocolate factory attempting to create Easter Eggs and get them sent off for delivery. It was a graphic adventure with over 120 screens, looking more like a forerunner to the classic adventure Dizzy than resembling its own predecessor. Harry was no longer immune to gravity, and could move between the different screens at will. This sequel cannot be said to have stood the test of time, and is generally considered to fall under the original title's shadow. It is remembered fondly, however, by some fans of the genre and was successful enough to be ported to the Atari ST and Amiga after A'n'F's eventual demise.

Unfortunately despite selling over a million copies, the cult following Chuckie Egg had received couldn't keep A'n'F Software afloat indefinitely. Snarl-Up for the BBC Micro never appeared and, finally, in 1985 the company went bust. Some remaining A'n'F-branded Electron stocks of Chuckie Egg and Cylon Attack eventually turned up as a free gift for Electron User magazine subscribers. When other development studios were being gobbled up by publishers, A'n'F struggled in vain to meet the demands of advertising rates and distribution prices.

Most of what was A'n'F, eventually found itself under the banner of M.C. Lothlorien, PC Chuckie Egg coder Ste Cork recalls.

"By '86 there weren't many people from the original company, and only Doug Anderson (the A of A&F ) left of the management, but he'd reverted to programmer-only status and it was by then being run by the managers of Lothlorien."

In the late 80s, hurried ports of Chuckie Egg - the PC version took no more than a month to develop - for new, emerging platforms including the Amiga and Atari ST, were developed in-house during a turbulent time which saw the company cycle through various guises, as Ste Cork remembers.

"M.C. Lothlorien and Icon Design were really one and the same. Originally, M.C. Lothlorien were an old speccy wargaming company ("Johnny Reb" etc), they ended up shelving the name when the managers bought out A&F, then renamed that company to Icon Design ('86?). They ran it as that name for a while, then for tax reasons they de-mothballed the Lothlorien name (dropping the MC I think, though not 100% sure) and switched to that again. A few years later it even (for tax reasons again) briefly became "Tudor World" - a company name bought off the shelf, under which it ran for another month or two before going under again somewhere around 90-91."

Unfortunately, before the new ports were released, M.C. Lothlorien ran too far into financial difficulties for it to recover and eventually went under. Those coders still with the company went their separate ways. This, coincidentally, saw Doug later working for a time at Runecraft alongside Matthew Smith, the author of the equally legendary platformers Manic Miner which has been held up in comparison with Chuckie Egg, ever since their respective releases.

The remaining assets, mainly unsold 8-bit cassettes, were bought out by Manchester-based Pick & Choose Ltd. under the direction of Asif Kowaji (sp?) for a nominal sum, and some of the later ports were rebranded and released under the Pick & Choose label.

Pick & Choose Ltd. was a general retailer, with little or no aspirations to move seriously into software publishing, so once the pair of Chuckie Egg titles became unprofitable and the stocks gradually sold out, the official Chuckie Egg brand slipped quietly away from the software scene, unnoticed by most.