Section 1: Introduction
Snake is a single-player arcade concept dating to 1976 and popularised on mobile phones in the late 1990s. The player steers a line that grows each time it eats, and loses on colliding with a wall or with itself.
Snake is a genre rather than a single product — countless implementations exist with no common owner and no governing body, so this describes the standard form.
The defining tension is that the reward is the hazard: every point makes the snake longer, and the board harder to survive.
Section 2: Platform & Setup
- Playfield: a rectangular grid, commonly bounded by walls.
- The snake: starts as a short segment and grows by one per item eaten.
- Food: a single item appears at a random free cell; eating it spawns another.
- Controls: four directions. The snake moves continuously and cannot reverse directly into itself.
Section 3: Objective
Eat as much food as possible without colliding. There is no completion state in most versions — play continues until the snake dies, so the objective is maximum length or score.
A theoretical perfect game exists: filling the entire grid with the snake's body. It is achievable only with a strategy that guarantees the snake can always reach its tail.
Section 4: Gameplay & Modes
- The snake advances one cell per tick in its current direction, continuously.
- Steering only changes direction — there is no stopping and no braking.
- Eating food adds a segment; the tail stops retracting for one tick.
- Colliding with a wall or any part of the body ends the game.
- Speed typically increases with length, shortening reaction time exactly as the board becomes more crowded.
Wall Behaviour
The single biggest variation between implementations: some versions kill on wall contact, others wrap to the opposite edge. They are materially different games, and it is worth knowing which you are playing before the first turn.
Section 5: Scoring & Winning
- Score is normally one point per item eaten, sometimes scaled by speed or level.
- Length is the more meaningful measure, since it is the actual constraint.
There is no win in the standard form — the game ends only in collision. The exception is the perfect game, where the snake occupies every cell and no free square remains.
Section 6: Competitive Rules
No sanctioning body exists. Where Snake is played competitively, events fix the variables that differ between implementations:
- Wall behaviour: solid or wrapping — the decisive rule, and not comparable across settings.
- Grid dimensions and starting length.
- Speed curve: whether and how quickly speed scales with length.
- Food placement: whether spawns are seeded or genuinely random, which determines whether runs are comparable at all.
- Verification is by video or replay, as with other record-based single-player games.