Chuckie Egg is back – on smartphones and tablets

Four decades after I last played it, Chuckie Egg is back, and I am controlling bright-yellow, big-hatted protagonist Hen-House Harry as he collects eggs, seed and avoids angry birds.

Better still, I do not have to wait for what always felt like an age for the game to load into my BBC Model B from cassette tape.

Today I can just fire up a smartphone or tablet and there Harry is thanks to Staffordshire software publisher Elite.

I went to Lichfield to talk to the firm’s co-founder Steve Wilcox about why they have brought Chuckie Egg back after so long and to hear from the man who wrote the game when he was just 16 years old, Nigel Alderton.

Alderton is very much giving me a Chuckie Egg masterclass – leaping from lift to ledge, to egg, to pile of seed.

“I’m rusty at best,” he tells me with a chuckle. “[It is] difficult getting the fingers going.”

After Chuckie Egg, Nigel wrote more games that were published by Elite as part of the huge Midlands computer games industry that sprung up in the 1980s.

These included hits like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and Commando.