From Nokia Snake to Snake3D
I was talking to my wife about how our children should properly learn to deal with all the AI stuff we experience today. AI-generated videos, texts, and code that we get bombarded with every day. When we were young we had only text messages (SMS) sent around. Life was so much easier. We figured that the only two things you could have on a phone were text messages and SNAKE. We both loved SNAKE. We played it on the Nokia 3310, which my anecdotal evidence says was the most popular phone when I was in middle school.
Good old times. Turns out we both remember it a little differently. While I was sure you could walk through walls in SNAKE, she insisted you could not. Well, turns out we are both right. The original SNAKE was only available on the Nokia 6110 where you could not walk through walls, while on the Nokia 3310 only SNAKE II was available.
(Well, I initially was searching for the pictures below but did not find really free pictures. I recreated them to get a clean shot. I also went to eBay and bought a Nokia 3310 and Nokia 6110. With that I went down another rabbit hole I might explore in another post.)
| SNAKE | SNAKE II |
|---|---|
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Building It
OK, so much for the history. While we were talking about AI we thought about the good old times. So I wanted to play SNAKE. Well, thanks to AI it took me only a few minutes to get my own version of it. Thanks, Claude. You will find it on Github - Snake3d.
Here is what it looks like:
I used Rust because it works pretty well with Claude and Zed, my new favorite editor. Bevy popped up one day on Hacker News and I thought: let’s give it a shot. I have to be honest, I have never looked at the code, not even once. I was really impressed by how precisely Claude could execute on my prompts. I know it is a small project, but I could have never implemented it like this while my children are around and constantly interrupt my flow.
Playing Together
We really enjoy playing the game. I even had to add a highscore since my children started playing it too. Watching them fight over who gets the next turn is exactly the kind of screen time I can get behind. From a conversation about AI to a family game night, not bad for a “weekend” project.