Snake is a video game that originated during the late 1970s in arcades and has maintained popularity since then, becoming something of a classic. After it became the standard pre-loaded game on Nokia phones in 1998, Snake found a massive audience.
The player controls a long, thin creature, resembling a snake, which roams around on a bordered plane, picking up food (or some other item), trying to avoid hitting its own tail or the "walls" that surround the playing area. Each time the snake eats a piece of food, its tail grows longer, making the game increasingly difficult. The user controls the direction of the snake's head (up, down, left, or right), and the snake's body follows. The player cannot stop the snake from moving while the game is in progress, and cannot make the snake go in reverse. However, Snake has had many variations since its release, depending on the game's platform. These variations involve the modification of certain rules e.g. the lethality of contact with walls.
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The Snake variety of games dates back to the arcade game Blockade,[1] developed and published by Gremlin in 1976.[2][3] In 1977, Atari, Inc. released, as an unofficial port, the first home console version of the Blockade concept, titled Surround.[4] Surround was one of the nine Atari 2600 (VCS) launch titles, and was also sold by Sears under the name Chase.
The first known personal computer version of Snake, titled Worm, was programmed in 1978 by Peter Trefonas of the US on the TRS-80 computer,[1] and published by CLOAD magazine in the same year. This was followed shortly afterwards with versions from the same author for the Commodore PET and Apple II computers. A microcomputer port of Hustle was first written by Peter Trefonas in 1979 and published by CLOAD.[5] This was later released by Milton Bradley for the TI-99/4A in 1980.[6]
Some better-known versions include the Neopets example, which is known asMeerca Chase. Its revised version is known as Meerca Chase II. A variant called Nibbles was included with MS-DOS for a period of time as a QBasic sample program.
An analog joystick-controlled variant of Snake, called Anaconda, was included as a hidden minigame in TimeSplitters 2.
The version included on the Nokia N70 and other later model Nokia phones is a 3D version, with level goals. The Nokia version has a Snake game in it as well.
There were several versions of Snake on the BBC Micro. Snake by John Cox from Computer Concepts was different in that the snake was controlled using the left and right arrow keys relative to the direction it was heading in. The snake increases in speed as it gets longer, and there are no "lives", making achieving a high score or reaching higher levels relatively difficult as one mistake means starting from the beginning.
Nokia is well known for putting Snake on the majority of their phones. Versions include:
Many variations of Snake do not include walls; on these, it is theoretically possible to fill the whole screen with Snake, and therefore win the game completely.
Snake can be played on YouTube videos that use the 2010 version of the player. When a video is selected, the user can press the 'left' key for two seconds before pressing the 'up' key. The game will appear and can be played in the videoscreen.[9]
A version called Old Snakey can be played inside Gmail. This requires accessing The Labs, turning on hotkeys, and then activating the app. Once available, it is played by pressing ampersand (&) anywhere inside the main Gmail window.