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Worm
Arcade · Oldies · plays in your browser, no download
You move, you cannot stop, you grow every time you eat, and you die if you touch yourself. That is the entire design. It is probably the shortest complete game anyone has written, and for a few years it was the most played game in the world.
Where it comes from
The idea arrives in 1976, in an arcade cabinet called Blockade from Gremlin: two players, each leaving a solid trail behind them, each trying to make the other crash first. Take away the second player, add something to eat, and you have the snake. Through the late seventies and eighties it turned up on practically every home computer, usually written by somebody in an afternoon, because it is a game you can hold entirely in your head.
Its second life is the famous one. In 1997 Nokia put a version written by Taneli Armanto onto the 6110. The marketing department had asked for something to make the phone feel friendlier; Armanto was handed the job because he had played a few games. The snake fitted in a monochrome rectangle a few dozen pixels across, needed one thumb and four buttons, and shipped on tens of millions of handsets.
It is worth saying what that meant, because mobile games did not exist as an idea at the time. A phone was for telephoning. Snake was the first thing that made a great many people pull a phone out of their pocket when they were not calling anybody, and everything the industry became afterwards starts there.
How to play
| Move | Arrow keys, or swipe. You cannot stop and you cannot reverse into yourself. |
|---|---|
| Eating | Every piece of food makes you one segment longer. |
| Dying | The walls, or your own tail. |
The cruelty of the design is that success is the difficulty. There is no level, no enemy and no timer: the only thing that makes the game harder is how well you have been doing.
Our version
The plain game, played with a thumb or the arrow keys, with the field sized so that a long snake is genuinely a problem.
Three things that help
Go round the edge, not through the middle. A tail laid along the walls leaves the centre open. A tail coiled in the middle divides the board into rooms you cannot get out of.
Take the food on your way past, not head on. Driving straight at it puts you in the corner it happened to spawn in.
Leave yourself a door. Before you close a loop, check there is a way out of it. Nearly every death in this game is a door you shut four moves ago.