Astro Chicken
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Astro Chicken was the name of an arcade game embedded in the 1989 Sierra On-Line graphical adventure Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon.
Gameplay consisted of attempting to land a chicken on a trampoline. The mechanics of the game were similar to those of Lunar Lander, with the exception that the chicken would rebound unharmed if it struck the trampoline too forcefully. When the chicken landed safely, it would exclaim "Bacock!".
In the fictional storyline of SQ III, the Two Guys from Andromeda were enslaved by ScumSoft. ScumSoft, in the game, is an evil software company, maybe partly inspired by SunSoft[citation needed], but also the Lucas Arts adventure games (the engine was called SCUMM)[citation needed] and Microsoft (some claim Elmo Pug was a caricature of Bill Gates[citation needed]). At ScumSoft HQ, they were forced to create games such as Astro Chicken. Consoles of the game can be found throughout the game universe, such as the Monolith Burger fast food chains (a spoof of McDonald's). During the course of SQIII, the player can find a hidden message from the Two Guys after beating the Astrochicken game multiple times.
The name was likely chosen in parody of the Astrochicken thought experiment by Freeman Dyson. Note that the game was intentionally simple and bizarre; it was supposed[citation needed] to be representative of the cheap, unfathomable games produced by ScumSoft's staff of unhappy programmers. A sequel, Ms. Astro Chicken, appeared in Space Quest IV.
The Astro Chicken theme music is a variation on the Chicken reel, a traditional folk song best known for its use in animated cartoons.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- SQ3 site with AstroChicken screenshot and info
- Astro Chicken article on the Space Quest Omnipedia, a Space Quest-oriented wiki.
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