KlapperSnake

Emdev

Contains adsIn-app purchases

About this game

KlapperSnake

A snake from 1992. The same snake.

Before there were phones, before there were apps, two guys sat at an Amiga and wrote a snake game in assembly. They called it KlapperSnake. It had hand-drawn graphics, a tune that stayed stuck in your head for days, and a two-player mode that ended friendships.

Now it's in your pocket. Not a reimagining. Not a "tribute". The original, same pixels, same notes, same snake.

This is not a retro filter

Most retro games are new games wearing an old look. KlapperSnake is the other way around:
it's the old game, running on new hardware.

- The graphics are lifted straight out of the Amiga's own IFF files. 28 hand-drawn food objects, gadgets, sweets, characters, flags, in their original 32 colous. Every turn the snake makes is its own drawn frame, not a mirrored or rotated one.
- The music is played from the original's own music data, interpreted note for note the way the Amiga's interrupt routine did it. Same period table, same volume chain, even the same tiny silent gaps between notes that the Paula chip left behind.
- The sound effects come straight off the original floppy disk. The boink when the snake eats is 1280 samples of raw 8-bit PCM from 1992, not a modern plop.
- The playfield is the Amiga's 38×23 cells. Not fitted to your screen, fitted to the game.

Play

Two thumbs. That's the whole control scheme. Left half of the screen turns left, right half turns right, exactly like the original's two Alt keys. No virtual d-pad, no swipe gestures to fumble at the worst possible moment. You'll learn it in three seconds and never finish mastering it.

The snake grows on a clock, not on food. Every seventh step it gets longer, whether you eat or not. Food gives you points, time gives you length. Surviving means becoming your own worst obstacle.

The levels come for you. When the snake reaches full length the stage goes up: the speed climbs a notch and the food changes theme completely. Six levels. The sixth one is not kind.

Bring someone

Split screen. Two players, one phone, one playfield, one piece of food to fight over. You get half the screen each. Run into each other and you both die — and what makes the mode genuinely mean is that whoever survives keeps playing alone, with the whole board and all the food, while the other one watches.

Or play the machine. With nobody around, the AI takes snake two. It doesn't cheat: it sees the same board you do, may only ask to turn left or right, and is only asked at the exact moment your own tap is read. It plays by your rules.

Every game can be played back

The best run you'll ever have is one you won't be able to describe to anyone. You won't have to.

KlapperSnake doesn't save a video, it saves the seed and every turn you made, then replays the game from scratch. The simulation is bit-identical every single time, so replays are tiny and exact down to the last sub-step. Your place on the high-score list comes with proof.

Nobody is watching

No accounts. No servers. No analytics on how you play. Your high scores, your replays and your settings live on your phone and stay there.

Download it

It took this snake thirty-four years to get from a floppy disk to a phone.

It's still hungry.

What’s new

First public release.