Big Chungus

Origin

Big Chungus is a fake video game. The image is a mocked-up PlayStation 4 box art — correct blue banner, correct rating panel, correct layout — for a game called Big Chungus that does not exist and never did.

The character on the cover is Bugs Bunny, from the 1941 Looney Tunes short “Wabbit Twouble,” directed by Bob Clampett. In the scene, Bugs inflates himself into a comically rotund shape while mocking Elmer Fudd. It is a single frame of a rabbit puffing out his body, drawn eighty years ago.

The cover was made by a Reddit user in March 2018, with no ambitions whatsoever. He has explained it plainly: he was bored in class and made it to send to a friend.

The word itself predates the image. “Chungus” was coined by the games journalist Jim Sterling as a nonsense term of emphasis, and circulated in gaming communities for years before anyone attached it to a rabbit.

What it means / how it’s used

Big Chungus has no meaning, and that is the entire joke. It is a nonsense product, presented with complete commercial seriousness, and the humour comes from the gap between the professionalism of the packaging and the absurdity of what it is packaging.

Its uses:

• Referencing the fake game as though it were real and highly anticipated.
• Applying “chungus” to anything large.
• Fake box art and storefront listings for other invented products.
• Absurdist posting where the reference itself is the punchline.

It belongs to the same family as Dat Boi — memes whose comedy is that they refuse to explain themselves, and where the shared knowledge of an in-joke matters more than any content in it.

How it spread

The cover sat unseen for eight months. It was posted to Reddit on December 1, 2018, and the thing that made it explode was not the image at all.

On December 7, 2018, a GameStop manager posted a story to Facebook about a customer coming into his store and seriously asking for a copy of Big Chungus. That post was shared to Twitter on December 8, 2018 and took over 13,800 retweets within two weeks, and a Reddit post on December 13, 2018 took 13,100 upvotes in a week.

The retail anecdote is what did it. A fake game cover is mildly funny; a fake game cover that people are walking into shops and requesting is a much better story, and it turned a private joke into a national one.

The institutional afterlife

Big Chungus then had an unusually corporate second life for a joke about a fat cartoon rabbit.

On October 8, 2019, the US Army’s official Instagram account posted a photograph of a howitzer that soldiers had named “Chungus,” which took over 142,000 likes. On March 29, 2021, the mobile game Looney Tunes World of Mayhem added Big Chungus as an actual playable character — making the fake game partially real.

Then, on August 26, 2022, Warner Bros. filed a trademark application covering the use of “Big Chungus” for video games.

That sequence is worth noting. A student made a joke image in March 2018; four years later the rights-holder of the underlying character was registering the joke as intellectual property.

Notable examples & variations

• The original fake PS4 cover, still the canonical image.
• Fake storefront listings and retail shelf photographs.
• “Chungus” applied to any oversized object.
• The Army howitzer post.
• The official World of Mayhem character.

Legacy / cultural impact

Big Chungus is one of the defining artifacts of late-2018 absurdist meme culture, a period when the dominant joke structure was a confidently presented thing that made no sense.

It is also a clean case study in how a meme’s origin gets lost. The image is from a 1941 cartoon, the word came from a games journalist, the cover was made by a bored student, and the thing that made it famous was a retail worker’s anecdote — four unrelated sources, none of which set out to make a meme, assembled by accident into one of the most recognisable jokes of its year.