🐍 Snake
Eat the red food, grow longer, avoid yourself. The snake wraps at the edges. Arrow keys or WASD to move.
Keyboard: Arrow keys or WASD to move · P to pause
About This Game
Snake descends from Blockade, an arcade game released by Gremlin Industries in 1976 and designed by Lane Hauck, in which two players drove growing lines that could not cross. It reached most of the world in 1997, when Nokia engineer Taneli Armanto built a version for the Nokia 6110 that ended up preinstalled on hundreds of millions of handsets.
The game trains spatial planning under a moving constraint. Every apple makes the board harder, so the skill being tested is route planning in a shrinking space rather than reflexes.
Fifty points is a decent run. Past 100 the snake is long enough that survival depends entirely on planning.
The tip most people miss: your tail is moving too. Beginners treat their own body as a wall and refuse to steer into gaps that look closed, but by the time you arrive, the tail end has moved on and the gap is open. Learning to count how many moves until a square clears is what separates a 40 point player from a 150 point one.
How to Play Snake
Use the arrow keys or WASD to steer the snake. Eat the red food to grow longer and score points. Avoid running into yourself. There are no walls to crash into: the snake wraps around to the opposite edge when it reaches a border. The game ends only when the snake collides with its own body.
Each piece of food scores 10 points. The snake speeds up slightly every 50 points, making the game progressively harder as you improve. Your highest score is saved automatically and persists between visits.
Tips to Score Higher
The most effective strategy at higher lengths is to move in a sweeping pattern rather than spiralling inward. Spiralling traps you. Sweeping keeps your escape routes open. Look several moves ahead rather than reacting only to the food position: the food will still be there in two moves, but a closed path will kill you.
Slow mode is useful for learning movement patterns. Once you can reliably reach 200 points on Slow, switch to Normal. Competitive players aim for 500 or more on Fast mode, which requires consistent path planning from the very start of each run.
A Brief History of Snake
Snake originated in 1976 as Blockade, an arcade game by Gremlin Industries. The Nokia version, pre-installed on the Nokia 6110 in 1997, became one of the most widely played games in history. An estimated 350 million phones shipped with it. The core mechanic has remained unchanged for nearly 50 years because it is close to perfect: simple to learn, genuinely difficult to master, and endlessly replayable.