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 an anthropomorphic slab of steak in increasingly brutal ways.

Overview

According to the App Store version history, the game was released on June 8, 2013.^[1]

The game starts off with the titular steak Charlie falling into frame and cordially greeting the player.

The player is then presented with a variety of ways of torturing Charlie, including pouring hot sauce in his eye, torching him, slicing him into pieces, and tenderizing him with a meat mallet.

There are four levels in total in the game, Well-done (the first level the player starts off in), Medium, Rare, and Raw, which all unlocked increasingly graphic and gorier ways of torturing Charlie, as well as the background and Charlie himself deteriorating the higher the level.

These levels could be unlocked using meatballs. Medium costs 10,000, Rare costs 100,000, and Raw costs 1,000,000. Meatballs are the main currency of the game. One of the ways these could be earned is through playing one of two mini-games. The first mini-game involves throwing knives at Charlie, who constantly moves across the screen. The second mini-game involves running as Charlie with the camera in a top-down view. You have to avoid obstacles including knives, rolling pins, and spilled chemicals.

Another way of earning meatballs was by gambling on a spin wheel, which costed 100 meatballs to spin.

Charlie also has an option to toggle on and off your microphone so he can listen to you speak and repeat your voice, similar to the mobile game Talking Tom.

There was also a built-in photo editor feature in the game. There were 300+ pre-made elements such as hats and eyes that were purchasable with meatballs and you could edit onto any picture you chose. You were able to share photos you edited using this on social media.

On Xitter, a few posts remain of people who used this photo editor feature and shared it to the website.

https://archive.md/oRoJx

https://archive.md/F5T69

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.^[2]

It was intended to be a spinoff of the "oi oi oi red larva" meme from a few months prior, which featured a stretched out PNG of Red from the cartoon Larva singing the song "OI OI OI Bakugou" by La Memerano.^[3]

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 brainrotting 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.

The general style of these videos utilize deepfake apps like Avatarify and Revive for the characters moving, and also makes sure to bombard your eardrums with 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, either edited to the tune of different music and other sounds like phone ringtones, or covers of the song itself.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggxgom1Xijk

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm-8Jxdj0Fk

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TArMJLlKpig

Friday Night Funkin' Mod

As with all things good, a Friday Night Funkin' Mod was eventually made of Charlie, The Steak called WELL DONE. It was about the Red larva battling an evil Charlie after he greedily steals food from his friend Yellow larva in order to teach him about the value of friendship. The pairing is an obvious reference to the oi oi oi and e e ei memes and their close association with one another. One of its more notable aspects is the admittedly cool climax of the mod where there are lyrics along with a fully animated sequence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdQN88QViuk

This was likely inspired by TWIDDLEFINGER (which itself was inspired by Jeffy's Endless Aethos), 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 unlike the aforementioned ironytroon mod, it was played completely straight with the original characters used being represented how they are in their respective source material.

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 creative director and developer, Dominik Hadl, which prompted him to begin working on a remake. He would make an announcement regarding this on the r/CharlieTheSteak subreddit on July 30, 2024.^[4] After a long delay, the remake finally released on the App Store on December 31, 2024 and was announced by Dominik on the official r/CharlieTheSteak subreddit again.^[5] The remake is essentially just the original game but updated to be playable on modern iOS devices with no other outwardly discernible changes.

Involvement in 2024 Wisconsin school shooting

On December 16, 2024, 15-year-old nazi larper femcel Natalie Lynn Rupnow shot up a school in a BPD-induced foid rage of underwhelming proportions because her black boyfriend Tyrone broke up with her after discovering his true calling as a bottom slut for BWC. She only ended up killing like 2 people, probably because her aim was complete and utter horseshit. She also killed herself afterwards (LMFAO). Satan himself later came forward in an interview to confirm that she was burning in the deepest darkest pits and depths of the inescapable flames of Hell because the victims' content was way better than her slop.

In an unprecedented turn of events, a video was recovered from Rupnow's phone gallery which revealed shocking footage of her convening with Charlie the Steak shortly before the events of the shooting.

The video in question:

Following the discovery, authorities told reporters that Charlie had become a SOI (Steak of interest) in the investigation and that his house was searched by police, though he is currently suspected to have gone into hiding to avoid prosecution. It is believed by detectives that he may have groomed Natalie into committing the shooting, telling her that if "she didn't like her life then she should go and change it." They also stated that Charlie might have connections to the infamous satanist grooming and sextortion cult 726, which might explain how they were able to get into contact with Rupnow.