Come to snuff the rooster

The weirdest game I've ever played? It’s a question I’ve never been asked but the hell, I’ll go with it anyway. Now I’ve over two decades of game experience under my belt so there is a wealth of material to work from. But when it comes to weird game, one immediately comes to mind: A game on the Commodore 64 called Cock’In.



Also known as Chicken Chase, I played this game when I was a kid in the late eighties/early nineties. As was the case with most games of it’s era it wasn’t the most complex game: It was set in a henhouse and the player controlled a rooster set with the task of protecting a hen’s eggs from a host of invaders ranging from hedgehogs, rats, foxes and snakes - this was done by pecking at the intruders and forcing them to flee.
And like other games of the eighties, it was an endurance test: The general goal of the game was to survive for so long and the player’s score, which was continually increasing, was based on how long they lasted.



It sounds simple but here’s the weird part: This game is an analogy for sex! I never realised it at first (call it due to being of a young, impressionable mind) but there is some really odd sexual overtones. See the screenshot above? Take note of that door in the middle which has a love heart on it. At the commencement of each life, the rooster automatically enters the door only to reemerge seconds later. Then the hen emerges from the door, lays an egg and then returns to the inside of the door.
That may sound odd, but remember what I said about this game being an endurance test? That to succeed is to survive? Well in-between intrusions from the invaders. The player can go into the door – once there they can spend some as long as they choose and the longer they do, a series of love hearts appear at the top of the screen. And upon emerging from the door, the hen then comes out and lays a number of eggs (on top of the one’s already laid) corresponding to the numbers of hearts that came up.

So yes: You are impregnating a hen in order to keep on playing.

And that isn’t all with the game: The longer you spend on the other side of the door, the slower the rooster’s movement speed gets – fortunately by finding a worm that can appear at random intervals, the rooster can find a speed increase.
Anyway the only way to lose this game is to lose all the eggs – whether through them hatching (which leads to a chick that runs to the door and then enters it) or the eggs being gobbled up by the invaders. And when all the eggs are gone, the player loses a life: This is represented through the rooster automatically going to a corner –which is then followed by the hen that comes out the door with a club (or something) and proceeds to smack the rooster repeatedly over the head. Really I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

So yes Cock’In takes pride of place of the weirdest game I ever played purely for being a game based around the concept that having sex is the way forward (one can only wonder why there was a name change with this game). Indeed, it’s kind of weird to look back at games from the eighties and see the type of stuff they got away with.
And to cap off the true bizarreness of this game, here’s the box art:


images from: lemon 64