Why this chicken crossed the road

It all started when a friend at university said they’d heard of this fun game called "Ou Est le Poulet".

One person would put on a chicken costume, run off to hide in Edinburgh's finest pubs, and a bunch of us would race to find them.

It just sounds fun, right?

And it was.

Many years later, the world had changed. COVID had been and gone, the UK economy had stalled and I had a job making various websites look nicer.

But I did have an idea that ate away at me - could I improve that chicken chasing game I’d played so long ago? Perhaps with location tracking? And a leaderboard, challenges and weapons? Surely hide & seek in cities needs to be a bigger thing?

So I got to work, spending my evenings building a prototype from my bedroom in April 2022. After a lot of coffee, the location-tracking was (sometimes) working and the game was ready for its first test.

But our game needed a name.

Initially it was just going to be "Ou est Le Poulet", but after asking some friends I found that most people in the UK can't reliably spell French. Back to the drawing board.

In the end, we settled on the name Chicken Rush.
(A mix of Ironhide's "Kingdom Rush", a game I played as a kid, and Aardman's iconic stop-motion film - "Chicken Run")

A couple of friends had heard about my game and due to a bit of miscommunication, they had told their friends we were doing a chicken hunt just for singles.

This wasn’t the plan, but after hearing about how their experiences on dating apps were - perhaps hunting a chicken with other singles wasn’t such a bad idea? Maybe hunting a chicken was exactly what they needed?

Our first game was for 60 singles, a mixture of my friends and friends of friends. The second was for 80. By the time of our third game, we had 100 people coming that I'd never met before.

These dating games became known as our Blind Dates events and have since hatched quite a few relationships! Which means some fun answers to "How did you two meet?" with "Well, there was this Chicken..."

We were making waves in London's dating scene with the Evening Standard & Cosmopolitan naming us one of London's Coolest Dating Events. Our events became massively over-subscribed, with a waitlist of over 2000 singles. More recently, we were on Channel 4 for like 30 seconds.

It turns out chasing a Chicken is the ultimate icebreaker. It kinda makes sense, distracting 150 singles with a silly game makes them forget that they’re on a date. And the best dates are the ones you don’t even realise you’re on!

Meanwhile, my mum and dad were warming to this “chicken-chasing obsession”. I think they were a bit worried I’d totally lost it.

I opened up the game so anyone could host their own hunt with their own friends in any city. And on one Sunday night, I woke up at 3AM with my phone buzzing non-stop - one of our videos was suddenly on a million views - a bit more than our usual 300!

People started setting up games around the world. We once had games running simultaneously in Madrid and Sao Paulo. (We accidentally translated "Hunt the Chicken" to "Hunt the Drugs" in Spanish, but we fixed that quickly). And after receiving a few TikTok comments from the US - I flew to New York, getting hunted around Williamsburg in the middle of a hurricane.

After two years of testing, we registered as a company. Cluckin About LTD was born.

And because we were now a company, we started offering Corporate Games for companies.

Perhaps dressing up your boss in a Chicken costume and hunting them around a city is exactly what the UK’s workforce needed.

At our first booking I arrived at a swanky new office with a chicken costume in my backpack, sat in the lobby and nervously practiced my intro speech again and again.

Since then, we’ve hosted games for Amazon, Meta, British Airways and many more.

Shout out to Nando’s - they’ve hunted Chickens in Dublin, Cardiff, Glasgow and Rome!

Now the dust has settled, let me explain why we're doing this.

The world has gotten a bit lonely after COVID.

In the UK, screen time amongst adults is at a record high and one pub closes every day.

Chicken Rush is a rebellion against all of that.

Since the first Chicken was chased we've had over 10,000 people go outside, make new friends and, in a surprising number of cases, find love.

And for the future?

My vision is to have an amazing team, full of people more talented than myself, who are obsessed with building great experiences that bring people together.

We’ll keep trying our best to get there, it’s hard work building a startup especially when the UK economy isn’t doing so good!

Remember - if nothing else, build something people enjoy.

Dean joined in 2025 and has been absolutely brilliant. Sadly, he lost his best mate to suicide in November 2025. In December, he started Empty Chairs - where he sits in a pub every evening with an open invitation to anyone wanting a chat. A brilliant example of how to bring people together.

We have a small army of kind volunteers (called the ‘Chicklings’) - ranging from a few old friends (Ed, Ruby, Kirsty, Poot, Alex, Hannibal, Charley, Millie), to some new ones met through previous games (Liuba, Ed, Lydia, Pippa, Toby, Jamie, Giorgio, Tabby, Aggy, Shaun, Lee, Sid, Sasha).

And a final shout out to my girlfriend. She gave up countless weekends to hide in a Chicken costume and get hunted by strangers.

For a long time, Chicken Rush wasn't making any money. Without this support it would have ceased to exist a long time ago.