One of the more unexpected and fascinating creations to come out of Twitch Plays Pokémon was a complex user lore, in which players refashioned the familiar Pokémon story to suit their experiences playing the game together on Twitch. Pokémon may not be the most complex of game worlds, but compared to Snake, its story might as well be Ulysses (1922). The key difference here being that Twitch Plays Pokémon (which is still going on, despite having already achieved its original goal) had a bit more material to work with, narratively. The whole experiment is reminiscent of 2014’s Twitch Plays Pokémon, which functioned in a similar manner, allowing multiple Twitch viewers to simultaneously control a game of Pokémon by entering commands into the chat. In Let’s Play Snake, the only way to die is by colliding with your own tail. Of note is that, in a display of mercy, the original game’s restriction of not allowing players to touch walls has been removed, meaning that boundaries simply move the player to the other side of the screen, like in Pac-Man. Fitting for Twitter, the field of play is represented entirely in emoji, with a snake emoji representing the snake’s current position, arrows behind it representing both its tail and past moves, and a mouse representing the goal. The account will then check for player instructions at regular intervals depending on how far the players have progressed in the game and move the snake accordingly. Rochat’s Let’s Play Snake is played through a computer-run Twitter account that takes the typically real-time game and slows it down to a turn-based format, allowing users to control which direction the titular snake moves by tweeting their desired input at the account. Now, thanks to web developer Yannick Rochat, Snake has been adapted for Twitter. There’s even a version of it that can be played over your favorite YouTube videos. This, in turn, has lead to its prevalence among a number of platforms, especially those that struggle for visual fidelity, such as graphing calculators and early cell phones. With visuals that can be easily represented using only a line and a dot, and rules no more complex than “get to point b without hitting anything along the way,” classic arcade game Snake has become renowned for its simplicity and elegant design.
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