Snake Game

About this test

Snake is one of the oldest ideas in video games: versions existed on arcade cabinets as early as the mid-1970s, where two players left a solid trail behind them and had to survive each other's lines. The single-player version with apples to collect became a mass phenomenon in the late 1990s, when it shipped preinstalled on monochrome mobile phones and millions of people discovered you could play it while queueing.

The mechanic is brutally honest: the snake moves on its own, you only control direction, and everything you score gets in your way afterwards. It's one of the few games where the reward is also the punishment. So a good player never takes the shortest path to the apple — they take the path that leaves the most options open afterwards.

The strategy that actually matters is the circuit: instead of aiming at the apple, you sweep the grid along a steady zigzag or spiral that is bound to pass over it. You lose a few seconds each time and you never trap yourself. It's less exciting than improvising, and it's the only way past thirty apples.

How it works

We count the apples eaten before the collision, wall or body. The 0-100 score starts at zero apples and caps at thirty-five, which puts the typical player somewhere between eight and twelve. Speed never changes during a run: the only thing that gets harder is your own length.