I remember copying the code out for a Snake variant from a Commodore 64 magazine in '83 or '84 - back in the days when they would publish source code for things in each issue - and it made Snake a craze at my country Australia Primary school where we had 8 '64s sharing a single networked floppy drive. It also made me, the biggest nerd at the school, the cool guy... for a few days..
Similar story at our school in Sydney ... mid 1990s we had a 2P (one keyboard) multiplayer snake hacking contest. I implemented flamethrowers and mines in my version, which enjoyed relative popularity.
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."
I distinctly remember thinking in 2001 that being able to play Nibbles on a cell phone was the apex of technology and it would be tough to get better than that.
I discovered this trick when I introduced a classroom full of kids to PhaserIO, and happened to notice an 8-year old playing both games simultaneously .. I asked him how, and he said "I just copied the game code together" .. NEAT! :)
My friends and I got very into Ingress [0] back when they only had 8 levels. Now that was literally a predecessor of Pokemon Go; I hear they used the portal data from the former to choose pokemon locations in the latter. Ingress seemed a lot more fun because you could be truly competitive, destroy other players' constructions and gain territory in your home area. There was even a running global count of how much territory each of the two factions had. That said my Pokemon career began and ended with Yellow on the game boy.
Ingress was a hot thing while I was in university. We were roaming the streets at night, equipped with smartphones and powerbanks and were looking out for members of the other party, so we had enough time to build up solid links all across the town. Great time!
How can someone confuse a Centipede clone (“Wiggle Worm”, an Apple 2 game that’s the subject of the video embedded in the center of the article) with Snake? I’m just gonna hope that’s a cut-and-paste error.
