Where to Play the Snake Game Online
Few games have been played by more people with less fanfare than Snake. Snake isn’t even really a specific game so much as an entire genre built on a simple mechanic: your goal is to collect (or, usually, eat) objects on the screen, but your character’s tail grows longer every time you do. If you hit the tail, you die. Games typically get harder the longer you play, but Snake directly connects difficulty to your success, ramping it up every time you do what you’re supposed to do. That makes it especially frustrating, but also drives you to play again and again. It’s simple, elegant, and very hard, which is always a recipe for compulsive play.
Many people first played Snake (aka “the snake game”) on a Nokia cell phone. The Finnish company that dominated the mobile industry in the ‘00s included a free version of Snake on all of its phones. Before smartphones and app stores, that free version of Snake was a preferred time-killer for anybody with a Nokia. The game wasn’t created for phones, of course; the original version of Snake was an arcade game from 1976 called Blockade. Blockade immediately inspired a raft of knockoffs for the arcade and home computers. The basic concept was popularized with a slightly younger generation by 1982’s Tron, whose light cycle minigame is a riff on Blockade. Snakes were associated with this type of game by the early ‘80s, and eventually the reptile lent its name to the whole genre after Nokia launched its cell phone version under that name in 1997.
Today Snake is as popular and endlessly playable as ever. In fact it’s consistently one of the most searched gaming terms on Google. If you’re looking for a good Snake game to play, whether on your computer or mobile device, here are our picks for the best of the bunch.
Slither.io
Steve Howse’s multiplayer take on Snake was a surprise hit in 2016 upon being released for browsers, iOS and Android devices. It’s Snake on a massive scale, with a large plane full of edible dots and snakes controlled by other players—many of which will be almost absurdly longer than your tiny little snake. If other snakes run into yours, their games end, and they’ll leave behind some supercharged dots that’ll make yours bigger and stronger. The goal isn’t just to avoid your own tale, but to get other players to run into it, so you can then eat their remains. It might sound brutal but it’s all cute, colorful, and cartoonish. It’s basically Snake updated for the 21st century as a hop-on, hop-off online game with a slight similarity to the battle royale genre. You can find it on iOS or Android devices, or play it in your browser here.
