About Google Snake
Snake is older than most of the machines it has run on. It goes back to Blockade, a 1976 arcade cabinet, and reached its widest audience in 1997 when Nokia put it on the 6110 — for a while the most-played video game on earth simply because everybody had the phone.
The rules have never needed changing. You steer a line that grows each time it eats. The board never gets bigger. Every apple you take makes the next one harder to reach, and the thing you will eventually crash into is yourself.
How to play
- Steer the snake around the board and eat the apples.
- Each apple adds a segment to your tail and adds a point.
- Running into a wall or into your own body ends the run.
- The snake never stops moving, and you cannot reverse directly into yourself.
Controls
- Arrow keys / WASD
- Turn up, down, left or right.
- Touch
- Swipe in the direction you want to turn.
Tips
- Hug the edges early. Eating along the border keeps the middle clear for later, when you need room to manoeuvre.
- Think one apple ahead. Before you turn for the apple in front of you, check where you will exit afterwards.
- Never enclose empty space you still need. Most deaths are not collisions — they are being sealed into a pocket several moves earlier.
- When the tail gets long, follow it. Tracing your own body in a spiral keeps a legal path open, because the tail end moves away as you go.
- Slow down your inputs, not the game. Double-tapping a turn is what puts you into a wall you already saw.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the Google Snake game?
It is the same classic Snake that Google has published as a doodle and search easter egg — same rules, playable here in the browser.
Can you win at Snake?
In principle: filling the entire board with your body is the maximum. In practice almost nobody reaches it, and the game has no ending screen before that.
Why did I die without touching anything?
You almost certainly clipped your own tail. At high length the head passes very close to the body on tight turns.
Do I need to install anything?
No. It runs in the page above.