Ever since Snake found its way onto Nokia phones back in 1998, it has become one of the most widespread and well-known game concepts in existence. Long before that, the world was already brimming with Snake variants, and the game I'm playing today is one of them:
Hypersnake is mainly inspired by Rock-Ola's 1982 arcade title Nibbler. Here's a screenshot:
And here's Hypersnake's first level, or "room":
While the maze looks different, the essential elements are the same: You are controlling an extremely hungry snake that has to eat all the dots in the maze. Each swallowed dot makes the reptile's tail longer, and if its head ever gets to touch any part of its body, a life is lost. I don't think self-cannibalizing snakes are a thing in reality, but that's what happening here, apparently.
Due to its blockiness the snake is a bit hard to make out in the above screenshot. Let me show you the level in motion:
Once the snake starts moving, you can only stop it by directing its head into a wall. It's not recommended to do this for long, though, because the timer goes down significantly faster while the snake stands still.
There are three types of edible dots in the game:
All of them make your snake longer once ingested. I know, that sounds highly suggestive, but these dots actually work, as opposed to the dubious pills certain junk Emails are trying to peddle. The middle dot also makes your snake, excuse me, your HYPERSNAKE faster. I guess that's where the name's inspiration comes from. The dot to the right has the opposite effect and slows your slithering serpent down.
And that's basically all there is to the game. It consists of six different rooms, so let's go through them one by one:
ROOM 01
The first room, as one would expect, is quite easy to complete and mainly acts as an introduction to the game. When the last dot has been consumed, the snake dramatically contracts while bonus points are added to the score.
ROOM 02
The second room is a bit trickier thanks to the many narrow tunnels and the sheer number of dots that cause the snake to grow to an unwieldy length. It helps to follow the maze's layout while remaining on one side for as long as possible.
ROOM 03
If you don't pay attention right from the start, you can quickly make this room impossible to complete. You absolutely have to collect the dots in the bottom corners first. Otherwise, your snake will have grown too long to get out of these circular tunnels without biting itself. After that, it's a good idea to tackle the top area while the snake is still relatively short, so you don't have to make too many loops to get most of the dots.
The rest of the stage is a race against time, as the repeated looping in the top area takes quite a while. As you can see above, I finished the room with barely two timer arrows left.
ROOM 04
The gloves are off in Room 03. The area to the left requires a lot of quick, precise movements, and if you don't collect the dots with some kind of plan in mind, you'll likely end up biting yourself. This just happened to me, and I was rewarded with the message SUICIDE SNAKE. That's a bit harsh, game. I didn't kill my snake on purpose. I must say, the controls are very responsive, so if I lose a life, it's really my fault.
The center area also needs some planning ahead or you won't make it out without your body getting in the way. I went in there earlier and only left straight lines of dots to collect last.
ROOM 05
This is an odd one for several reasons: It's as if the publisher, CP Verlag, asked the game's author to include a level with the magazine's name in it. Compared to the previous stages, this room is very easy to complete. It also feels a bit rushed, as only the lower half of the maze is even accessible, and there is an incorrect tile in the C of MAGIC. Worst of all, Hypersnake wasn't even released on Magic Disk 64 but on Game On instead. Oops.
ROOM 06
The final room is also the hardest to complete, I'd say. At least until you get an idea in which order you should clean the sections. I recommend trying the center one first. It is the maze's most narrow area which only gets worse to navigate with increased snake length. After that go to the left and eat the dots while moving in a nice, symmetrical pattern.
There were a lot of close calls in that final room. I almost made my snake too long to get out of the right section, but I was lucky by about one tile. Then I needed to make a long detour to get the entire body out of the right side before I could re-enter the area for the last time. At that point, I knew I would not be able to leave the section, so I had to make sure to collect all remaining dots in one go. To be honest, I wasn't quite expecting this kind of a thrill ride from a snake game.
Now for the big question. What happens once Room 06 has been cleared?
Hypersnake repeats, but gets a bit faster. It's an endless game, unfortunately. To be fair, Nibbler does the same thing, so this is just in keeping with the source material.
I continued playing and managed to reach Room 13 (the beginning of the third loop) before I ran out of lives. My reward was the top entry in the high score table. It looks like, aside from myself, only two other people played Hypersnake. Ronald is the game's author, Ronald Mayer, and Oliver Menne was a freelance employee at CP Verlag.
Because the game is rather simple, I wondered if it was completely written in BASIC. I couldn't just press RUN/STOP to reveal any program listing, so I had to dig a bit deeper. This made me stumble upon some interesting background information about Hypersnake. Well, interesting to me at least.
Although the title screen has a copyright notice that says 1989, there is evidence that the game is a few years older. If you load the program from the disk and list it, you get this:
As you can see, the SYS command starts with line 1986 which is very likely a nod to the year this game was originally created. "But that alone is no evidence that the game isn't from 1989!" I hear you say, imagined reader. Well, admittedly, no. But this is:
Rowly was released as a type-in listing in issue 07-08 1987 of the German magazine Computronic. Even though it has a different name, it's essentially the same game as Hypersnake, but with some additional menu options and a slightly different set of levels.
THE JOY OF TYPING During the eighties, it was quite common practice for hobbyist programmers to send in their creations as listings to computer magazines. Most magazines did not include a cassette or a disk yet. Readers were required to type the entire code on their computer and hope that, in the end, something functional would emerge.The listing of Rowly is split up into two program parts. Both of them are in BASIC, but the second part is just used once to generate the tile graphics and some machine code that's then loaded and used by the first part. I looked at the listing, and some of it is awfully cryptic since certain lines require typing in special characters. Instead of showing these in the listing, there are instead abbreviations for them, but nowhere in the magazine is there an explanation of what they mean. Here's an excerpt: 3530 PRINT"{DOWN RIGHT4 SK SL SH6 SK SL SPACE SK SL SH6 SK SL SPACE SK SL SH6 SK SL}" 3540 PRINT"{RIGHT3 S* SH SH SPACE S*4 SPACE SM SH SPACE SM SN SPACE S*4 SPACE SM SN SPACE SM SN SPACE S*4 SPACE SM SH S*}" 3550 PRINT"{RIGHT3 S* SK SL SPACE SV SW SV SW SPACE SK SL SPACE SK SL SPACE SV SW SV SW SPACE SK SL SPACE SK SL SPACE SV SW SV SW SPACE SK SL S*}" Good luck figuring out what this is supposed to look like on your C64! |
We've encountered Ronald Mayer before. He is the author of Electra. And guess what, this is also a game that was initially released as a listing in a German computer magazine, this time in Compute Mit 8/88. In there it was called Intruder. There was a similar case with Acia where the author sent essentially the same game to two different magazine publishers. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is some unethical practice or anything like that, I just find it interesting to discover.
CONCLUSION
Hypersnake is a simple game that won't hold anyone's attention for very long. That said, it is solidly made and doesn't look too bad for a title that's mainly written in BASIC.
The graphics style is quite pleasant, with all the tiles going for a nice faux 3D effect. It's a bit monochrome, though. Some use of different colors would have improved the overall look a bit.
The sound is very minimal. The only way to minimize the sound any further would be having no sound at all. Every dot that gets eaten tickles a tiny blip out of the C64's SID chip. Once a room is completed, the scoring is accompanied by a low-frequency drone that sometimes continues into the next room and doesn't stop until another dot gets collected.
As I mentioned already, the controls feel pretty tight. If I want the snake to take a turn, it reacts almost instantly. If I accidentally cause the snake to bite its own tail, then it's always my fault. The difficulty mainly comes from maze sections that require a lot of turns in quick succession or from the sometimes pretty ruthless time limit.
If you feel like playing a Nibbler-inspired game on your C64, Hypersnake might still your hunger for multicolored dots, at least for a while.
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