Listen, honestly, last Friday was really hard for me. I literally spent a few days lying in bed, unable to do anything. When I started to feel better, I decided to vibe-code with GPT. Why not remake some classic games? So I started with Snake.
I think the Atari belonged to my neighbors. Later, when they got a PC, they had Commander Keen 4. The main character had a handheld computer on his arm, and inside it — besides the game menu — there was Pong. A game inside a game. The original version was created in 1972 by Allan Alcorn. A legend.
Even before I was born, Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in 1984. Later, it reached me as a Brick Game 9999 in 1 device that I took on long train rides. Today Tetris lives on my phone — and strangely, it needs the internet just to start.
My father once came back from Finland with a new Nokia phone. It was the legendary 3310, and of course I found Snake on it — a game created by Finnish engineer and game designer Taneli Armanto in 1997. I think this might be my favorite game ever.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s not a commercial project. I just had fun with it. It felt really good. I was lying there later, you know, on the couch (okay, I don’t actually have a couch), playing Snake and thinking: damn, this is so cool. We made a game that doesn’t annoy you with its design. I feel better.
Wait, hold on, I’m looking at this as graphics. You see the field, right? A 21 by 21 pixel field. It splits perfectly into three blocks of 7 pixels, which matches the width and height of the control buttons. And the buttons have nothing on them. Absolutely nothing. I tried, you know, arrows, even hieroglyphs — none of it felt right. I especially like how it looks on a phone. It’s like a bud.