Snake
Snake is a video game in which the player has to guide an ever-growing strip or line, often depicted as a serpent or a worm. To be precise, the player controls the movement of the snake’s head, and the rest of its body follows the chosen path. This path most often leads to a treat, which is always present on the game board. Whenever the snake eats the treat, its body grows and the treat reappears somewhere else on the board.
As the snake gets longer, the game gets more complicated. This is because the snake must avoid colliding with its tail and the walls. Whenever such collision happens, the snake dies and the game is over. The objective of the game is to eat as many treats and get as long as possible before dying. And death is inevitable because the available space is limited and the snake eventually runs out of the room to grow. You are a true master of this game if you can play long enough for your snake to fill the entire game board.
How to play Snake?
Initially, the snake is so short that it resembles a square. At this point, you can move freely: use the arrow keys on your keyboard or tap on the game board to choose the direction in which you want the snake to go. However, after eating the first treat, the snake gains some length and is no longer able to immediately reverse its direction of movement. If you want to make a U-turn, press two arrow keys in quick succession or make one tap somewhere behind the snake’s head. The location of the tap will indicate whether the snake should turn back by making two turns to the left or two turns to the right.
Each treat adds four squares to the snake’s length. When the snake grows, the speed with which it moves goes up slightly. Under these increasingly difficult circumstances, avoiding death is not enough to be the true champion of the game. You also have to strategically plan your moves to get to the treats as quickly as possible. Once you are able to beat the game by filling the entire game board, you will be awarded some bonus points. And the better your time, the higher the bonus.
Game features
The game has three difficulty levels: Novice, Experienced, and Virtuoso. In each next difficulty level, the game board is bigger than in the previous one, the snake moves faster, and the number of treats is higher. As a result, higher difficulty levels take more time to complete but also reward you with a much higher score. However, we recommend starting with the Novice difficulty and only moving to higher difficulties once you complete the easier levels. Good luck beating them all!
If playing takes too long and you need a break, you have an option to pause. You can pause the game by pressing P or Esc or by clicking (or tapping) on the page anywhere outside the game window. Upon pausing, the clock stops and turns gray while the game window becomes blurred. To resume the game, press P or Esc again or click (or tap) anywhere inside the game window. Moreover, the state of the game is automatically saved whenever you close the browser. So if you exit the game in the middle of playing, you will be able to pick up where you left off the next time you open the page, as the game’s state will be automatically restored.
To start a new game, you can simply press Enter. You can also press one of the buttons above the snake window. These buttons allow you to select the desired difficulty level and every time you press one of them, the game begins anew. If you don’t just want to restart the game but to reset all game data, you need to press Shift + Delete. This will return the game to its factory settings. This function is recommended if something goes wrong with the game and it malfunctions or you want to reset your high scores.
Finally, we strongly encourage you to rate the game and leave us feedback. Star ratings are saved and should update automatically every week. You can also leave a comment using the feedback field under the game window. All such messages are sent to our developers, who read them periodically.
Snake’s history
The origins of the Snake game date back to 1976 when a two-player game, “Blockade,” was made available on arcade systems. In this game, there were no treats for snakes to eat. Instead, the snakes’ tails were fixed in place and their length constantly increased while players controlled the snakes’ heads. Players had to maneuver them to avoid crashing into the border or the tail of theirs or the opponent’s snake while trying to force the other player to crash. Whoever lasted longer won. These rules were very similar to the “Light Cycle” sub-game of the arcade game “Tron” published in 1982 and its subsequent clones, including a popular multiplayer network game (also named “Tron”) available on Macintosh personal computers in the late 80’s.
Soon after the publication of “Blockade,” the gameplay evolved into a now recognizable singleplayer mode in which treats (often shown as apples or eggs) suggest where the player needs to go and are required for the snake to grow. Such arcade games appeared as early as the late 70s, and the first home computer version, called “Worm,” was published in 1978. However, the game gained most of its popularity after it was developed by Nokia and published on its Nokia 6110 mobile phone in 1998, as well as on other subsequent indestructible devices made by this Finnish company.
Currently, thanks to technological progress, players have access to much more advanced gameplay on their devices. However, Snake still retains its popularity, mostly due to nostalgia and partly because of the game’s appealing simplicity. A number of clones have been published on the Internet, including a game made by Google that appears after typing appropriate words into Google Search. If you are looking for something more complicated, we recommend Snake at snake.onl. There you can find a campaign, a multiplayer mode for up to four players playing on the same computer as well as the “Tron mode,” which will take you back to the very origins of the entire genre.
Other important snakes
Snakes have always been important to humans. In the Bible, the devil took the form of an insidious serpent and tempted Adam and Eve to commit a sin by eating a fruit often depicted as an apple. This association between a snake and an apple is probably the reason why apples are used as treats in many Snake video games. Since these predator reptiles are strictly carnivores and don’t eat fruit, apples aren’t necessarily the first choice as their food. (Another explanation may be the association with a worm, which is often depicted as happily sticking its head out of a hole in a juicy apple).
For keen video game players, a snake, instead of thoughts about the Bible, may bring back memories of the Metal Gear franchise, in which the name of the protagonist is Snake. The authors named the characters in those games after Snake Plissken, the hero (played by Kurt Russell) of the dystopian science-fiction movie “Escape from New York.” Therefore, this name has nothing to do with the traditional Snake video game genre.
In general, snakes are mostly treated as unfriendly and dangerous and are despised and avoided. For example, Indiana Jones hated snakes. That’s unsurprising, as the fear of snakes is one of the most common phobias around the world. But sometimes, snakes can also bring good, for example, healing, as is the case with the caduceus, the symbol of medicine in which two serpents twist around a staff. Using this as an inspiration, we hope that playing our Snake video game will bring relief to the stressful lives of our players.
Your own Snake!
If you own a website, you can publish our game on your website free of charge. You can customize the game so that it doesn’t show the article, navigation, or ads. You can even add your brand (or any other short message) as a watermark on the game board. Alternatively, if you do not own a website, you can still customize the game and share it using a link. Read more in our article on how to embed the Snake game.
Contact information
You can use the small form below the game window if you have any feedback about the game. You can also send us an email at contact@solitaires-online.com. Any questions, complaints, thanks, or comments are welcome.
This game was created by the Simiade company. Here is how you can contact us:
Adam Narkiewicz
Plac Bankowy 2
00-095 Warszawa
Poland
+48 728235409
contact@simiade.com
https://simiade.com/