Charlie, The Steak
Charlie, The Steak was a 2013 mobile game developed by DynamicDust for iOS devices. It was advertised as a stress-reliever game wherein you can torture a sentient piece of steak in increasingly brutal ways. The titular steak, Charlie, repeats everything the player says into the device microphone, in a similar fashion to the mobile game Talking Tom.
There were four levels in the game, Well-done, Medium, Rare, and Raw.
Besides the main gameplay there were mini-games that, when beaten, would reward the player with meatballs. These meatballs were the main currency of the game that could be used to unlock the higher-tier levels and other bonus content such as unlockable items for the in-game photo editor. Another way of obtaining these meatballs was gambling on a spinwheel, which costed 100 meatballs to spin.
On Xitter, a few posts remain of people who used this photo editor feature and shared it to the website. The following are examples (archive these)
It was a novel twist on the many Talking Tom-esque virtual pet games that were dime a dozen on the App Store at the time.
The game was delisted from the App Store in 2015 due to DynamicDust closing down and since then has been considered lost media.
e e ei i'm on vacation
In April of 2024, some guy on TikTok made a meme which used a picture of Charlie reciting misheard lyrics to the song "Vacation" by Dirty Heads. It quickly went viral on TikTok because they just let anything get popular these days.
It was intended to be a spinoff of the "oi oi oi red larva" meme from a few months prior, which featured Red from the show Larva singing the song "OI OI OI Bakugou" by La Memerano.
The Sloppening
Shortly after e e ei took off on TikTok, content farms that were milking oi oi oi on YouTube then latched onto the meme en masse in record time, continuing to pump out hilariously bad brainrot videos featuring both oi oi oi and e e ei.
These videos typically play out the same way, with Charlie and Larva singing their respective songs, getting into a scuffle, and then somehow turning into amalgamations of one another by the end of it. It also utilizes deepfake apps for the characters moving, and bombards your eardrums with a cacophony of loud and annoying zoomer meme sound effects in the perfect blend of slop guaranteed to fry your attention span within minutes. Needless to say, children happily ate it up, with some shorts and videos reaching millions of views.
Some remixes of e e ei were also made
Some of the content farm videos also used clips from the actual Charlie, The Steak game, most notably the scene where his eye gets graphically pulled out with a fork. The comments under these videos are full of horrified iPad kids, meaning this shit is probably going to be an early traumatic memory for Generation Alpha.
There were also... other kinds of videos, of which some pretty much just speak for themselves.
ei ei ei estoy de vacaciones
On June 9, 2024, a Spanish parody of e e ei i'm on vacation called "Ei Ei Ei Estoy De Vacaciones" was created by the latinx YouTuber Vristok, featuring a hyperdetailed 3D model of Super Meat Boy singing the song, alongside other staple slop characters like Gegagedigedagedago and Pomni. Content farms were again quick to adopt this for use in their videos, and ei ei ei estoy de vacaciones became a new variant featured alongside oi oi oi and e e ei.
A sequel called "Ei Ei Ei Estoy de VOIDcaciones" was made on October 12, 2024 by Vristok, which seems to be based on this video.
Friday Night Funkin' Mod
As with all things good, a Friday Night Funkin' Mod was made of Charlie, The Steak called WELL DONE. This was likely inspired by TWIDDLEFINGER, some other shitty mod about a content farm, in this case being Max Design Pro and the Gegagedigedagedago nugget. However, this time it wasn't so bad because it was clear actual effort had been put into it.
Return from Vacation
Because of the e e ei meme, people began to look into the origins of the steak in the image. After determining its origin in Charlie, The Steak, they quickly found out that there were no archived IPAs of the game file, meaning that the game was lost media. The search for Charlie, The Steak continued, with even posts on X being made about it that got thousands of likes, helping further spreading the word about it until on August 2nd, 2024, someone named Dipper Gaming uploaded the IPA file on archive.org, preserving this once thought to be lost piece of mobile game history.
The newfound popularity of Charlie miraculously was enough to catch the attention of its original developer, which prompted him to begin working on a remake. The remake released on the App Store on December 31, 2024 and is essentially just the original game but updated to be playable on modern iOS devices.
