The Snake variety of games dates back to the arcade game Blockade,[2][3] developed and published by Gremlin in 1976.[4] In 1977, Atari, Inc. released, as an unofficial port, an early home console version of the Blockade concept, titled Surround.[5] Surround was one of the nine Atari 2600 (VCS) launch titles and was also sold by Sears under the name Chase. That same year, a similar game was launched for the Bally Astrocade as Checkmate.[6]
The first known personal computer version of Snake, titled Worm, was programmed in 1978 by Peter Trefonas of the US on the TRS-80 computer,[2] and published by CLOAD magazine in the same year. This was followed shortly afterwards with versions from the same author for the Commodore PET and Apple II computers. A microcomputer port of Hustle was first written by Peter Trefonas in 1979 and published by CLOAD.[7] This was later released by Milton Bradley for the TI-99/4A in 1980.[8]
There are several versions of Snake on the BBC Micro. 1982's Snake by Dave Bresnen is different in that the snake is controlled using the left and right arrow keys relative to the direction it is heading in. The snake increases in speed as it gets longer, and there are no "lives", making achieving a high score or reaching higher levels relatively difficult as one mistake means starting from the beginning.
Nibbler is a single-player arcade game released in 1982. Another single-player version is part of the Tron arcade game, themed with light cycles.
Starting in 1991, Nibbles was included with MS-DOS for a period of time as a QBasic sample program.