Snakes

About the game

The classic snake game, rebuilt from scratch for a console with only 128 bytes of RAM. The snake moves on its own in the last direction you chose; you only steer. Each piece of fruit you eat adds a segment to the body and points to your score, and a new fruit appears somewhere free on the field.

The game is over when the snake runs into a wall or into its own body. The field is 24 by 16 squares, and the author explains in the README how the tight memory limit shaped it: every body segment fits in a single byte.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Atari 2600: a new game by independent developers for the 1977 console, not a commercial release. It runs here in Stellerator, an Atari 2600 emulator written in JavaScript. Click Play now and press any direction to start moving.

There are no save states on this platform: like on the real console, a game lasts as long as you keep playing, and P pauses it. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

No reversing. The snake cannot turn straight back on itself; a press in the opposite direction is ignored.

Watch the high score. The display alternates between your score and the best score of the session.

Plan your turns early. The snake moves one square at a fixed pace, so a turn pressed a little before the corner is safer than one pressed too late.

Credits and licence

Snakes was written in 6502 assembly by Robin Sergeant and released under the MIT licence. The licence text is linked from this page.