Chuckie Egg
Platform: BBC Micro | Year: 1983
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion that generally leads to a disappointing experience. Video games epitomise this, which is why I think it’s often better to remember the games you loved, rather than play them.
Influenced by a Kotaku article I read years ago and Edge magazine’s now dead column My Favourite Game, I wanted to write down the memories I have of the games I played since I was young. These games have powerful emotions attached to them, some that are now painful due to the passing of time and the people that have left my life. These are the stories of the games that made me.
Chuckie Egg was the first game I played, in the days when schools had a mystical BBC Micro in a special room that sometimes the good kids got to visit.
Circa 1985, in my memory, computers in those days were something to be exposed to. Schools didn’t know what they would do to us yet or if they were an evil force that may destroy us, but they had been sent one, it cost a lot of money and therefore it must have educational value. Little did they know of the pandora’s box they were to open in my mind.
I must have been 6 years old, I remember being left alone in the games room with two friends and we were playing a weird educational dragon adventure game. There was a box of disks and one friend knew enough to get us out of the dragon game into Chuckie Egg, a relatively fast-paced platform game involving emus and giant eggs. Those precious minutes of playing it, no doubt heightened by the imminent return of the teacher, changed me forever.
I have a memory from that time of standing in the playground talking to a friend about how, in the future, there will be games where we can roam around cities like my home town of Bristol, doing whatever we want. Whenever a new open-world game like GTA appears now, I love to think about my 6-year-old self having his mind blown.
