The Top 7... Eggs

Yesterday was Easter Sunday, and aside from our enjoyment of stating the obvious, we bring that up because Easter is a time for contemplation. Specifically for contemplating eggs. Not only are they delicious in both their natural and chocolate forms, but they’re fun to paint and hide, a ritual that apparently has something to do with the death and rebirth of a messiah over two millennia ago.

Unsurprisingly, the omnipresent ovoids have also played key roles in games over the years, and you know what let’s just cut the crap and get to the eggs already.

Anthropomorphized eggs are strangely rare in video games, and rarer still are ones who’d actually be trusted with the job of night watchman at a steel mill. Charlie may be living evidence of why that is, considering that, in the first few minutes of his strange little quasi-3D platformer, his abject incompetence nearly brings the whole place crashing down on itself.

Charlie’s infuriatingly chirpy voice and weirdly inappropriate, Popeye-like patter set him off on the wrong foot with the audience right away, and continue to do so as he yelps and cackles his way through the rest of his boring-ass game. For all his faults, though, he does tend to get splattered a lot, and his steel-worker ensemble is just tough-looking enough to make him an almost-credible (if incredibly annoying) hero. And his game, while tedious, is oddly interesting to look at, using 2D sprites of 3D-rendered graphics to create an illusion (however shaky) of 3D gameplay.

Also, he’s got a nemesis named Blast Furnace Bill who’s – get this – a disfigured, evil genius egg in steel armor. Although he can’t be that much of a genius, considering that he continually harasses Charlie with robots and hazards, when as a fellow steel-mill employee, it would be much quicker (and more responsible) to simply report Charlie’s gross incompetence to his superiors.

Above: Actually, maybe we should have made this entry about him

So yeah, Charlie’s not one of the better eggs. But we threw him on here anyway, because A) he’s still more interesting than roughly 95 percent of video-game eggs, and B) he’s about to make the rest of these entries look amazing.

If watching March of the Penguins taught us anything, it’s that the lives of penguins are centered mainly on keeping their fragile eggs safe from the elements. And if you ever wanted to see that concept made into a game, then Sega’s Penguin Land series has you covered, as its lone penguin protagonist strives to push its huge egg down a series of platforms without shattering it.

This isn’t an egg with a personality or any great purpose; it’s just an egg. However, your existence depends on keeping that egg safe. The penguin himself doesn’t have lives that deplete as he runs afoul of crushing traps and bullying polar bears; he is inconsequential and expendable compared to his stock of eggs, which are extremely limited. This creates a driving need to keep the egg out of harm’s way, and because of that need, the egg becomes unimaginably important. You will project your emotions onto the egg. You will imagine a rich future shared by the egg and the penguin, if only you can get it down to the bottom safely.

And what does that future involve? Well, it depends on which of the Penguin Land games you’re playing. In the original, getting the egg down to the bottom delivers it into the hands of the penguin’s spaceship crew, who carry it off into the dark recesses of their vessel to probe its albumen in a surprise twist ending worthy of Rod Serling. In the Genesis version, he pushes it down to his wife, at which point it cracks open and reveals a flower. Then either she swoons or he blushes, or she turns her head in disgust at the strange aberration and he turns red from the embarrassment.

Above: Possibly both. It’s kind of hard to tell

Like so much else in the dystopian version of Wonderland glimpsed in 2000’s Alice, this Humpty Dumpty is a piece of work. He doesn’t say anything; he just perches on a rock, tapping his cigar ash and waiting for players to notice him. And when they do, the reaction is almost uniformly “holy shit, what is that?”

Apparently ravaged by the same forces that turned Wonderland into a nightmare (or just by a great fall, whichever), this Humpty is huge and shattered, with only half a face for glowering at you in a menacing (but not exactly threatening) way. And the bit of exposed egg poking out from where his right eye used to be is unquestionably hard-boiled, sending a clear signal that this is not the same effete little gentleman who Alice encountered years before.

This is an angry Humpty Dumpty. A Humpty Dumpty for the aughts. A Humpty Dumpty who smells cordite and blood in the night, who dishes out two-fisted justice in the night to the thugs and pimps who make the streets mean. This is a Humpty Dumpty who’s seen things, who’s done things, and who frankly couldn’t care less who you are or what you have to say about it.

Or he could just be a particularly effective piece of animatronic set-dressing for a memorably dark game. Whatever.

Plenty of Pokemon have weird childhood issues. Cubone, for example, likes to strut around wearing its mother’s skull, and Pokemon like Yamask aren’t “born,” but enter the world as the spirits of the dead (hinting at a truly terrifying afterlife laying in wait for Pokemon’s protagonists). However, Togepi is the only one that refuses to ever leave its egg, insisting on wearing the splintered husk everywhere it goes in an extreme case of arrested development. If Togepi were capable of carrying large wads of cash, it would be every psychiatrist’s wet dream.

It’s easy to dismiss Togepi’s disgusting eggshell fixation as just a by-product of it being an anthropomorphized-egg Pokemon. In fact, you may actually need to do that, because otherwise it’s hard not to see this thing is super-gross. Eggshells are kind of nasty at the best of times, and Togepi has been wearing the one it was born in since… well, since it was born. Imagine what it smells like under there. Probably like egg farts and raw sewage.

Above: Also we think it might be pooping in there

Despite its creepy inability to leave the (literal and metaphorical) womb, however, there’s something undeniably adorable about Togepi, assuming you can overlook that the spikes jutting out of its head emit poison. (It’s not entirely clear how said poison is emitted, so we’re just going to imagine that it sprays the stuff in every direction, like a particularly loathsome sprinkler.) And to be fair, when Togepi evolves (into Togetic or Togekiss), it does learn to leave its shell – sort of. Given that those creatures have the same markings on their bellies as Togepi has on its shell, we’re guessing the shell acquired a life of its own and spread across Togepi’s entire body, encasing the host organism completely and assuming control.

Above: The horror… the horror…

Pokemon are scary.

Other than maybe the egg from Penguin Land, it’s difficult to think of an ovoid embryo that’s been as central to its game’s plot as the Wind Fish’s Egg from Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Sitting high atop a mountain, it dominates the landscape of the island of Koholint. And while it looks like a ridiculous speckled thing sitting atop a pedestal that barely contains it, its importance can’t be understated.

Inside the egg sleeps the Wind Fish, the magical creature who’s dreamed up Koholint and everyone on it – except for Link himself, who washed up on its shores after a shipwreck. Koholint’s a beautiful place, but it’s a dream that’s gotten out of control, and is in danger of being overrun by monstrous nightmares. In order to save Koholint, Link must destroy it – and the Wind Fish’s Egg is the key.

Above: Hey, wait a… THAT’S A MAMMAL! And apparently also a very drowsy glam-rocker

It’s the big MacGuffin that drives the plot, and players are aware from early on that it’s going to be their eventual destination. It’s where everything you’ve worked for pays off, as Link brings together eight magical instruments that can wake the egg’s inhabitant, and it’s where everything will end – for players, for Link and for Koholint itself, which will cease to exist when the Wind Fish wakes. Eggs are traditionally symbols of birth and renewal, but this may be one of the only times that symbolism is applied directly to something that is, in fact, a doomsday device (however imaginary said doomsday might be).

Possibly the only anthropomorphized egg to ever enjoy any kind of lasting success or adulation from fans, Dizzy is – for many older UK gamers – a mascot on the same level as Mario and Sonic, emblematic of an era in gaming that was, for them, dominated by the ZX Spectrum computer. And to be fair, Dizzy’s pretty unique, occupying a series of balls-hard games that blend platforming with adventure-game-esque item puzzles and very few lives.

Dizzy exists as an egg for one very simple reason: eggs are easy to animate. And while he’s been depicted numerous ways on his boxes (usually with an assortment of hats), Dizzy’s always depicted onscreen the same way: as a grinning, googly eyed ovum with boxing gloves and a habit of rolling after jumps, something that tends to send him right the hell off cliffs if you’re not careful.

Sadly, love for Dizzy appears to be a UK-only phenomenon, as his only real exposure in the US came from the somewhat ill-received NES/Genesis Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, which made the series’ clumsy action more demanding (without really making it less clumsy) and its adventure-game elements more awkward. Even so, Dizzy soldiered on through nine “core” games and a handful of spinoffs in Europe before eventually petering out around 1994, only to come back last year with an iOS remake of his sixth game, Prince of the Yolkfolk.

Above: Not too bad for an egg, especially for an egg that barely made it out of Britain

All right, this one’s cheating a little, because where all the other eggs on this list are singular, the term “Yoshi egg” actually encompasses a wide variety of eggs spread out across numerous games. But their ubiquity and versatility makes them hard to ignore, and considering that Yoshi’s a purportedly male character, he’s left an awful lot of these things laying around over the years.

Yoshi eggs started out fairly simple; in 1991’s Super Mario World, they were a power-up, albeit a really cool one; find an egg, and it’d hatch into a dinosaur that you could ride. Later in the game, different-colored ones started appearing, giving you little hatchling Yoshis that you’d have to carry in front of you like a bulldozer blade, running into enemies so that your new pet could swallow enough to become a full-sized Yoshi.

It was in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island that these things really came into their own, though. As Yoshi ate enemies, he’d immediately metabolize them into eggs, which followed him around in a line and could then be used as ammunition. Not only was this an awesome (and possibly scatological) use for enemies, but it made the eggs much more central to the gameplay than when they’d just held a new friend for Mario to ride.

This also set the standard for the way they’d appear in future games, particularly the Smash Bros. series, in which Yoshi can gulp down opponents and encase them in eggs. This of course raises some interesting questions as to just what the hell is going on inside that dinosaur’s body, and what purpose eggs really serve for the species, considering Yoshi also uses them as safe hiding places in games like Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Probably better not to dwell on it, then, and just concentrate on how awesome those eggs are. And not what Mario or Samus go through when they’re rocketed through Yoshi’s digestive tract and wind up encased in an egg.

Above: Gross

Obviously we've left out a lot of prominent eggs from gaming's long and convoluted history. Is one of them your favorite? Are eggs better as inanimate objects, or do you prefer it when they have faces and personalities? Discuss.

And yeah, we know, you disagree with us. We're wrong about one of the entries, or we forgot something, or we're stupid for not including your favorite thing. It's fine, we get it.

Don't just sit there shouting at the screen, though - comment below and let us know what you think.