Instructions

You are a hungry snake. Eat all the food, which includes cherries, grapes, blueberries and bugs, to grow longer. Some food leaves a nasty yellow mushroom. Don't eat mushrooms! Get the right combination of food and you will be rewarded with a Green Jelly bonus, the most excellent of all the Jellies.

Starting the game

Load it up on a real Commodore Vic 20 or by using an emulator such as VICE. See the Download & Install Instructions for more on that.

Once the game has loaded, start playing with one of the function keys; F1, F3, F5 or F7. These select the diffulty level. Pressing fire on the joystick will also start at the last difficulty level you selected.

Control the snake with the WASD keys or a joystick.

Hints and tips

When the game starts you are positioned at the top of the screen with food and mushrooms appearing around you. Get ready as you won't have long to become acquainted with your surroundings.

Guide the snake around the screen avoiding the mushrooms and your own body.

Eat all the food to progress through the wave. More food will appear when you have gobbled it all up until you get to the end of the wave, at which point you will have a bonus for each mushroom in play.

Each wave will get harder by getting faster or more food to collect and mushrooms to avoid. Can you reach wave 5? Some say it is possible.

Try eating one of each fruit to get a Green Jelly bonus. Green Jelly is the best kind of jelly and you will be rewarded handsomley.

Finally, try playing on harder difficulty levels as these reward you with bigger scores for food and bonuses.

Get more snake

The game is 100% free to play and you can download it below. However, you can also purchase the game on tape to load into a real Vic 20. These special editions are available from The Future Was 8Bit for £6.99. This price basically covers the cost of production and is just for fun.

The full source code is included with Turbo Rascal, the superb development tool I used to create it. Take a look in the Tutorials / Vic20 folder. I also have the source code for my other games included there.

Acknowledgements

Thanks firstly to Rod Hull from The Future Was 8bit for the inspiration for the games title. Rod loves snake games which are the best games, obviously. He's a thoroughly nice chap who has supported the retro community for yonks, producing hardware and software for us mere mortals to buy and own in physical form. The future is really 8bit. In particular, check out the Penultimate+ and SD2IEC's, essential purchases for any Vic 20 owner.

Also a huge thanks to Leuat, the creator of Turbo Rascal which I have used to make Snake Games are the Best Games, and all my other Vic 20 games as it happens. Turbo Rascal is a wonderful tool that is fast and efficient, helping you to make great games and demos for many 8bit and 16bit computers. Download a copy for Windows, Mac or Linux now, completely free!

Vic 20: Snake Games are the Best Games screenshots