Hacker News Reader

There was a version called "Nibbles" that came with QBasic (Which in turn came with DOS 5). It also had another artillery style game called Gorillaz.

I guess the nokia implementation is considered the reference because it had the install base and must have wasted hundreds of thousands of hours worldwide.

IIRC the DOS version was pretty much unknown unless you happened to scour your disk for .BAS files.

Heh, yeah the Qbasic one was good, I remember extending it to have powerups, 23 levels and 4 player ...

The Wikipedia page for this is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_%28video_game%29 Wikipedia traces it back to "Blockade" in 1976.

And the reference for me is the version that was bundled with 4.0 BSD in 1980 (also the distribution that introduced Zork)

Aah, the time I wasted on that one and the Gorilla game. It's a bit odd given how advanced our current games are.

It's kind of like how the reference for tetris for many people is the gameboy version.