When Snake was still a Worm

Whenever you activate the game Snake on your shiny Nokia phone, have you ever paused to think who programmed the game or if the mobile phone is the game’s first platform? No, I didn’t think so.

Well, I did. Not because of curiosity, unfortunately. It’s because I programmed a game just like Snake in Basic language back in the early 80s on my rusty Apple IIc.

“Wait! You mean to say you’re the creator of the first Snake game?”

Duh, no. What I mean is, “I was around 10 years old at that time, and I had been studying how to write different programs on Basic. One of the programs listed in the book I had been using as a guide was Worms, the original title of the game.”

“Really?” Yes, really.

Here’s a short history lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Snake is a video game that came out in the late 1970s and has maintained popularity since then, becoming somewhat of a classic. The player controls a long, thin creature, resembling a snake, which roams around one a bordered plane, picking up food (or some other item), trying to avoid hitting its own tail or the “walls” that surround the playing area. Each time the snake eats a piece of food, its tail grows longer, making the game increasingly difficult. The user controls the direction of the snake’s head (up, down, left, right), and the snake’s body follows. The player cannot stop the snake from moving while the game is in progress.

Wait! Before I post more about Snake’s history, let me point out that in my Basic version of the game, pressing a key in an attempt to make the snake move in the opposite direction kills the snake as it also, technically, counts as bumping into its body. Anyway …

The Snake variety of games originated with the arcade game Blockade, released by Gremlin in 1976. The first known microcomputer version of Snake, titled Worm, was programmed in 1978 by P. Trefonas on the TRS-80 computer, and published by CLOAD magazine the same year. This was followed shortly afterwards with versions from the same author for the PET and Apple II computers.

So next time you activate Snake on your mobile phone, remember that the Snake was once a Worm.

For more retro gaming goodness, keep reading Re:Retro. Those interested in mobile phones, their accessories and applications, try browsing through Cellphone9, another quality technology blog from b5media.

Image shows Kurt Russel reprising the role of Snake Plissken, the protagonist in the film Escape from L.A. by John Carpenter.