> the famous snake game we could play on our Nokia 3310
I typed in the snake code from Home Computer Magazine (v.4 no. 5). If anyone cares to reminisce with me, see page 69 (or 123 for the actual code) at this link: https://archive.org/details/HomeComputerMagazine_Vol4_05 That version was called "Slither", but there were no ".io" domain names just yet.
But wikipedia says it goes back even further to 1976:
That Welltris screenshot reminds me of another, though younger, great 3D game from an ex-ussr country I played around the early 2000 iirc. It was a 3D version of snake, playing on a cube's surface, looked like something out of the demoscene and had an awesome selfcomposed soundtrack. I think the developer was from Ukraine or Belarus, not sure anymore. Never found it again unfortunately ...
Nibbler (1982) is directly mentioned in the article.
>"The game Snake existed before 1995. It first arrived in 1976 as an arcade game called Blockade and spawned several clones from there. Whether it was Nibbler, Worm or Rattler Race, the basic concept was consistent."
At high school in the 90s I made a graphical snake clone in QBasic which was local multiplayer and had lots of extra features, some of which were hard-to-see bombs you could drop and detonate when the other player came nearby, and lasers which could shoot out ahead of you. There was some friendly competition in the game innovation department from students senior to me but my clone definitely landed the student's choice award for gameplay. Yay QBasic!
When I was looking for the forgotten game, I crawled through the internet and found almost any other available title (LightBot also). I'm teaching computer science and try to collect as many tools (e.g. games) to people with no programming experience.
What a blast from the past! The first game in the linked archive (Davidson's Zoo Keeper) was my GF's (at the time) first project at Davidson. Firefox under Linux had no trouble rendering it (sound included)!
I remember playing this game a couple of times at the MIT Student Center when it first appeared. I recall that it cost 25 cents, which at the time I felt was too much for me to spend on a less than engaging game.
I also got to play Spacewar!, the 1962 progenitor of Computer Space. It was running on an computer with an oscilloscope-like display residing in a lab I was using somewhere on campus. In that game there was a central "sun" that exerted a gravitational pull.
Games from the mid 1970s were, to me, notably better. I liked Lunar Lander which ran on the CDC 6600 operator terminal[1]. This was a dual screen system employing two good sized circular screens! They were vector graphics screens (like oscilloscopes). The mainframe operators let me into the machine room only a few times after hours and let me play the game on what was certainly the most expensive solo video game system I've ever used.
Another early game that I found fascinating was 0Airfight, it ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system[2], a very early time-sharing system that had a few thousand terminals. This was a 3D dogfight (with very primitive graphics) and the first networked player vs player game I ever played.
Finally, I played an arcade game in an airport around 1978 that was the first version of snakes[3] that I had ever seen. This inspired me to implement it myself using Pascal on a TI 990 micro controller; it was the first game I ever programmed. I was working at Texas Instruments, and I got to go to Munich to demo it at an Electronica trade show[4]; I met with engineers from Mercedes Benz, but I don't think they adopted our Pascal tool-chain for their automotive electronics.
I remember people sharing Excel games back in the day (when webgame sites were blocked at school). There were simple snake games and also fancier ones like a pop-up shooting gallery.
Eventually the students discovered that they could download a Flash game as a SWF, bringing their collections in on flash drives and trading them in the lab.
Love it, i played so many of these games :) Also once made a ball bounce around the screen using amiga basic. Guess that was my first attempt at programming :D Thanks for sharing!
Awesome project. The PS1 version of this game is one of my favorites from growing up and also the reason my home server's hostname was "eelnats" for many years.
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