Snake

Snake is one of those games that everyone has played, but nobody remembers the first time. It came pre-installed on Nokia phones in the late 1990s and somehow ended up being the most-played video game of an entire generation. The mechanic could not be simpler — you control a moving line, you eat food, the line gets longer, eventually the line hits itself and dies. There is no story, no upgrade system, no premium currency. It is the purest possible arcade loop.

Our version is grid-based, 20 by 20, with the wall-collision rules from the original Nokia game (not the wrap-around variant — we think walls are more interesting). Arrow keys or WASD on a keyboard, swipe on a touchscreen. Press space to pause. The snake speeds up slightly every 50 points so the game can't be ground forever; eventually your reaction time gives out.

How to be good at it. Snake has one real strategic principle: leave yourself an escape route. The most common death for new players isn't hitting a wall — it's getting trapped inside their own coiled body with no way out. As your snake gets longer, plan your moves not just for the current apple but for the move after the move after the next one. The best players play on the edge of the board on purpose, because edges constrain the snake's path in ways that make the body easier to predict.

The other principle is to commit. New players hesitate at intersections and end up triggering a 180-degree reversal that the game won't accept. Pick a direction, commit, and only change at the last moment. Hesitation is what kills you, not bad reflexes.

Our highscore is saved to your browser's localStorage, so you can beat your own record across sessions. There is no online leaderboard because then you'd start wondering whether other people were cheating, and the whole point of Snake is that it's just you versus your past self.

Build notes. The game is about 250 lines of vanilla JavaScript. A timer fires every 140 milliseconds (faster as you score), the snake's head moves one cell in the current direction, and we check collisions in O(N) where N is the snake's length. Even at 400+ segments, this runs comfortably at 60fps because we draw only on each tick, not on each animation frame. Worth playing back-to-back with our Frog Hopper if you want another arcade classic that still works in 2026.