Snake

1984 · action · MS-DOS · Tom Kristensen

If you have ever seen a Snake computer game, you have seen them all. Snake: Ultimate Edition is no different. Brought to my attention by Home of the Underdogs and pulled from the Archive's own Total DOS Collection Release 14, Snake: Ultimate Edition was developed in 1984 by Norwegian programmer Tom Kristensen. The COM file's header indicates that the copyright was held by Borland Inc. I could find no further information on that company. I thought maybe it referred to this Borland , but considered it unlikely, as it was based in Austin and founded mainly by Danish citizens instead. Perhaps the Austin-based Borland was a distributor at some point. Anyway, a far cry from being the ultimate Snake game, there is little else to this clone of Snake , barring a few features, some of which I find to be novel for its time. One of these is the ability to set the speed of the snake (or its hastighet , as the game calls it), with values ranging from 0 to 99. In addition to the voracious green serpent ever expanding in length as it eats yellow squares, its speed also gradually increases. Don't be fooled, however, as the number counts down rather than up. Also, a set of walls, each referred to as a vegg , can be toggled on or off, but they prove to be an afterthought, as they are always C-shaped and always appear in their positions on the right side of the screen. In addition, this game is displayed in a graphics mode using the Color Graphics Array, or CGA. Unsurprising that is, but I don't think that I have ever seen a Snake game where the object the snake is supposed to eat constantly reappears in more or less different sizes. With everything else inside the snake's natural habitat being one exactly one pixel wide, this can interestingly lead to situations where the goal is partly obstructed and must be reached from one side or the other. You can also run a demo of the computer playing the game. It usually plays well, until it foolishly spirals the creature inward and crashes it. Lastly, if you detest PC Speaker, you can shut it up with the press of the L key. All right, that is Snake: Ultimate Edition in a nutshell, nothing more, nothing less. You can probably just move on to something else, and even if you were an avid Snake fan, you may want to see more polished examples, such as Daniel Schlyder's Deluxe Snake and Andreas Spreen's Green Snake . Still, if you are itching to get a bit of computer history from Norway, you could do worse than to play this one.