Snake

How to play Snake

1. Steer the snake into the food — arrow keys or WASD on a computer, swipe or the on-screen arrows on a phone.
2. Every bite adds a segment. The snake never stops, and the real opponent is your own ever-longer tail.
3. Hit a wall or your own body and the run is over. Sliding into the spot your tail is just leaving? Legal — the classic close shave.
4. After every 5th bite a bonus star appears for a few seconds. It pays triple and adds no length — always worth the detour.
5. Pick your pace: points per bite scale with speed, so Turbo players earn their bragging rights. Best score per speed is saved on your device.

A little background

Snake is the game a whole generation played under the school desk. The mechanic dates to 1976 arcade cabinets, but it became a world-wide reflex in 1997, when Taneli Armanto squeezed it into a Nokia phone — a monochrome screen, a beeper that could hold one note, and hundreds of millions of pockets. No downloads, no updates: if you had that phone, you had this game.

This version keeps the rules honest — walls end the run, faster speeds pay more per bite, and a timed bonus treat shows up every fifth meal, just like the sequels everyone remembers. Flip on Retro LCD for the green screen and blocky pixels, and the sounds are synthesized single-voice square-wave blips, the way a phone beeper actually sounded. Free, no ads, works offline once loaded.