In the years since 1997, the landmark release of the Nokia 6110 and its inclusion of Snake have seen Snake ported to (or shamelessly ripped off for) countless devices. For about the past year, there’s been an effort to bring it to DOS while continually decreasing its file size—and at long last, we’ve finally reached 56 bytes courtesy of donno2048’s Snake for DOS port [h/t Hacker News].
Now, some immediate caveats are worth noting with this particular port of Snake. First, it runs too fast on the original hardware without a few configuration tweaks pointed out in the Hacker News thread that technically balloon the size past 56 bytes. It works perfectly fine in DOSBox and the web app, at least in terms of game speed.
However, this DOS version of Snake does have one key glitch that makes it more challenging to play than your typical versions of Snake. If you fancy yourself a finesser, you must play this version of Snake without inputting backward inputs (as soon as you have more than three length), lest you immediately devour yourself and die. Usually, Snake doesn’t make self-devouring this easy, so you have to be ultra-precise with your movements to play this DOS port of Snake adequately, which is a suitable bump in difficulty for the retro OS and hardware, even if it’s a glitch.
Previously, we’ve also seen Snake slither onto Raspberry Pi Pico and even a Raspberry Pi RP2040 LED array. Snake ports are so lax in terms of hardware requirements that they’re even possible on any modern RGB keyboard with individually addressable keys, which I first experienced with Zaneo’s Corsair (K70) RGB Snake game.
Like Tetris (1984) and Pong (1972), Snake (1997) is an all-time staple of low-spec gaming, especially on mobile devices. It’s also proof that fun gameplay doesn’t necessarily require the most GPU-punishing graphics on the market—even the original Pac-Man (1980) is only about 24 kilobytes. But as this project proves, fun gameplay doesn’t need a full kilobyte—it seems to start around 60 regular bytes.
