Snake 64

Snake 64 is a homebrew game by Rosie Sapphire released on 18 September 2024. As it names implies, it’s a game of Snake adapted and rewritten for the Nintendo 64.

You can download the ROM from its download page on N64 Squid by using the password slitheringsnake, or from the mirror on Github, where you can also compile it on your own by using Libdragon.

About Snake 64

Like last week’s Vlak 64, this game is based on the series the originated in the late 70’s but was widely popularised on the Nokia 6110 and 3310 line of phones.

The gameplay of Snake 64 is simple: the snake is always moving around a grid, and has to eat apples while avoiding the outer walls and your own tail. Every time you eat an apple, an additional segment is added to your tail so the game becomes progressively harder until you either collide with something or run out of space.

The graphics are even simpler. This version of Snake is pretty much just an 18×13 grid of grey cells with black borders. The apple is a red cell, and the snake has an orange head with darkening shades of brown towards its tail.

Not much context is given to Snake 64, this is all that is said by the creator:

It’s snake… but for the Nintendo 64… nuf said.

Rosie Sapphire

Review and conclusion

Snake 64 is a faithful rendition of the classic game – it does what it says on the tin and sticks to its guns just the way that Rosie says in the readme.md. It’s also the kind of game that you’d build as a test since the game mechanics are quite straightforward—move in a direction, collect items, grow, and avoid obstacles. This makes it easy to implement the basic game loop without extensive code complexity.

As simple as the game is, there are a couple of things that could be improved. The starting position is right in the middle, which doesn’t give much reaction time when first starting a new round. Also, the snake only changes directions if you are holding down the directional buttons when the next ‘step’ is made, so a small tap might be ignored completely.

Snake is one of those games that stands the text of time and it’s good to see it represented on the N64 homebrew scene (besides NuSnake). It could you a few more bells and whistles, but it serves its purpose well enough.