Brick Snake
A snake game for your Mac that feels like holding a brick phone from the early 2000s. Chunky green screen, slow ghosting pixels, piezo beeps and rubber keys.
A little demo for this page. The real game is coming.
It’s playing itself right now. Tap the phone to steer.
The pixels are slow on purpose.
Old phone screens couldn’t quite keep up with themselves. A pixel took its time going dark, so anything moving dragged a faint ghost behind it. Brick Snake does that one pixel at a time: about 40 milliseconds to switch on, about 110 to fade away.
Pixels blown up huge and slowed to a third of the speed, so you can watch the ghost. Drawn live for this page.
Green screen
84 by 48 pixels on a soft green backlight, with a faint shadow under every pixel and a visible grid between them.
Piezo beeps
One small square wave, one note at a time, quiet and a bit tinny, like the buzzer in an old handset. Every tune is original.
Rubber keys
The whole phone sits on your screen. Click its keys and they press down. Hit the matching key on your keyboard and they press down too.
Know your snake.
These are the game’s own sprites, four pixels square. Small, but they say a lot.
- Mouth. Opens when the cell ahead holds something to eat.
- The bulge. Food you swallow travels down the body as a lump.
- Notches. The body has a saw-tooth edge, never plain blocks.
- Corners. Each bend has its own sprite, and the snake still joins up when it crosses a screen edge.
- Tail. Keep it moving. Your tail is the only part of you that gets out of the way.
Six things worth chasing.
After every fifth food, a creature turns up for 20 moves and then it’s gone. The sooner you catch it, the more it’s worth.
Food: your level in points.
Creature: your level, times half the moves it had left.
- aBeetle
- bFish
- cBird
- dMouse
- eSpider
- fTurtle
Six places to run out of room.
Each one keeps its own top score. The maps below are the real layouts from the game, shown with the snake at its starting spot.
Nine speeds.
Pick one before you start. It stays put for the whole game, and every food pays out your level in points, so being brave adds up.
0.27 secondsbetween moves at level 4. The default.
Two ways to hold it.
Phone view
The whole handset, in a window shaped like the phone, with a real shadow around it. Drag it anywhere by the body. Click the keys or use your keyboard.
Screen-only view
Just the green screen on a dark surround, in a window you can resize or full screen, always at the biggest clean size that fits. Press V to swap views any time.
Diagrams, not screenshots. The game isn’t finished yet.
Keys you’ll want.
Brick Snake is for Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 13 or newer.
- Steer
- ArrowsWASD2 4 6 8
- Select
- Enter5
- Back
- EscDeleteC
- Pause
- SpaceP
- Sound
- M
- Phone or screen
- V
- Full screen
- F
Coming Soon
Release: Coming Soon
Brick Snake is still being built. When it’s ready, the news goes on Instagram.