If you’re at least in your late teens you’ve likely had a run-in with Snake – the classic 2D game “enjoyed” by millions in the late 90s as one of the first proper examples of gaming on a phone. You’re not really missing out on much by not playing it, but those who did can get a kick out of picking it up again today. Snake 3D, however, might be the game to push your love/hate relationship with the game a little too far.
We can’t imagine this is the first time something like Snake 3D has come along, but searching for it results in a bunch of multiplayer spin-offs built on the Slither.io craze.
Wffranco of Github has instead released a proper Snake 3D you can play in your browser. You may have put your days of browser-based games behind you as you left high-school many years ago, but if you’re ever stuck in the office with not much else to do, slithering onto Github’s.io website could help you pass the time.
So what is Snake 3D exactly? It’s the same Snake you remember (not that Snake), only with an added Z-axis. Rather than using the arrow keys on your keyboard or Nokia 3310 keypad to left, right, up, and down, holding the Shift key in Snake 3D allows those same arrow keys to move forward and backward through a 3D space. As you might expect, playing a game that uses depth so heavily on a 2D screen makes for a rough ride. It’s why shadows are so important to the 3D platformer genre.
Snake has always been a simple game. It’s a game of object collision with the game only ending when the snake hits a wall or itself. You move the snake around the screen and pick up stationary food pellets, and doing so extends the length of your snake and speeds it up, boosting the chance of the snake hitting itself. It’s a formula that was most likely the inspiration for the Slither.io craze from a few years back, but Snake 3D goes back to the fundamentals of the game while adding, quite literally, a new dimension of gameplay.
Thanks go to BoingBoing for the find.