Snake Arcade Game

This Snake game is free and open source (MIT). Original project: github.com/patorjk/JavaScript-Snake

How to Play Snake

You control a snake that never stops moving. Steer it with the arrow keys or WASD on desktop, or swipe on a phone. Food appears somewhere on the board; each piece you eat adds one segment to your body and one point to your score. The run ends the moment your head hits a wall or any part of your own tail. There is no timer and no enemies — the only thing standing between you and a record is your own length.

The game starts the moment the page loads, so your first run is one click away: click the board, press an arrow key, and go.

Rules and Scoring

One food, one point, one segment. Your score equals your length minus the starting size, so a score of 50 means a 50-plus-segment snake.
Walls are fatal. Unlike wrap-around variants, this board's edges end the run.
Your tail is fatal. Crossing any part of your own body ends the run — this is what actually kills most long runs, not the walls.
Speed creeps up. Each bite makes the snake a little faster, so late-game steering happens in a tighter window.

8 Tips for a Higher Score

Hug the walls early. Keeping the center of the board open gives you an escape hatch when you are long.
Follow your own tail when lost. Your tail tip is the one square guaranteed to be free next turn — chasing it is always a safe holding pattern.
Never coil tighter than four cells wide. A loop with an inner corridor narrower than your length can trap you permanently.
Eat toward open space, not away from it. Before grabbing food, glance at where the largest free region is and approach from the cramped side.
Slow down mentally after each bite. Most deaths happen in the half-second after eating, when the new segment shifts your turn timing.
Boustrophedon the mid-game. Sweeping up and down in long lawnmower strips keeps your body stretched and predictable.
Keep turns wide once past 60 segments. Sharp double-turns need space you will not have.
Play the first 20 points fast, the rest slow. Early risk buys nothing; late patience buys everything.

Difficulty: It Scales Itself

This version does not need mode menus — difficulty comes from your own score. At 10 segments the board is mostly empty and you can relax. By 40 you are planning two turns ahead. By 80 you are threading a moving maze made of your own body at a pace that keeps creeping up. Every run is therefore a natural difficulty curve: your record is the mode you have unlocked.

Classic Snake vs Modern Snake

The game on this page follows the classic rule set: a flat board, deadly walls, food that grows you one segment at a time. Modern takes add wrap-around edges, portals, moving obstacles, multiplayer arenas and battle-royale modes. If you want the version your memory of a 1990s phone matches, you are in the right place — and if you want to dig into what exactly makes a Snake "classic", the classic snake game page breaks down the rule differences in detail.

Snake on Nokia Phones

For millions of people, Snake means one specific thing: the monochrome game preloaded on the Nokia 6110 in 1997. That version added level speeds and a maze-free board, and it turned a mainframe curiosity into one of the most-played video games on Earth — Nokia shipped it on roughly 400 million phones. The Nokia snake page covers that history and how this browser version compares to the one on a green-backlit screen.

Retro and Original Snake

Before phones, Snake was a 1976 arcade machine called Blockade, and before arcades it was a programming exercise on mainframes. The retro and original snake page traces that lineage — from two players fencing each other into dead ends to the single-player eating game everyone knows.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Snake arcade game free to play?

Yes. Snake is completely free on ArcadeQuokka — no payment, no account and no download required. The game is open source under the MIT license.

How do I control the snake on mobile?

Swipe anywhere on the game area in the direction you want the snake to turn. On a desktop, use the arrow keys or WASD.

What is a good score in Snake?

Casual players usually land between 20 and 60 points. Anything above 100 means you are comfortably managing a snake more than a hundred segments long.

Does the snake speed up as it grows?

In most classic versions, yes — each food item nudges the pace up slightly, so a long snake is both bigger and faster to steer.

What happens when I hit a wall?

On this page the playfield walls are deadly: touching them ends the run. Some classic variants instead wrap around to the other side.

Where is my high score saved?

In your own browser's local storage on your device. Nothing is uploaded; clearing site data erases it.