In this golden era of retro gaming, having spent a summer playing classic Tetris versus mode on the SNES with all members of my family, I remembered a game we used to play on an old DOS computer in my grandparents basement. The game was called Pizza Worm, and while it was probably not the first snake game to be made, in my opinion it is the one with the best lore. Simple? yes, very deep? no. But still a young mind can dream up the rest, and arguably it is hard to match the esthetics and feel of playing video games in a pizza parlor. Probably the most famous later variation of the snake genre is Snake 2 for the Nokia 3310, which was great, but there is something great about having the full degree of freedom that’s available in Pizza Worm (and even later Achtung Die Kurve!).
Anyways in the golden age of AI and VIBE CODING!!! making games for the SNES has become accessibly for even the simplest minded of python programmers and script kiddies so I have attempted to create an homage to the classic Pizza Worm game called Pizza Snake for the SNES that you can play on classic console or with a flash cartridge or on emulators. It’s free for download here and I really hope you enjoy it, however I regrettably have to inform you that to make the game without some important bugs has proven to be too challenging even for what many fear may become our AI overlords, the issues mainly having to do with the limitations with the SNES hardware. If you would kindly direct your attention to exhibit A below showing a screenshot of the game in action, you’ll notice that the back end of the tail is quite peculiar and somewhat out of whack.
Exhibit A: The Pizza Snake with a scrambled tail
This issue has to do with the SNES only being able to show a quite small number of sprites on screen at the same time (which allow for the simple smoothness of the front end of the snake), therefore I have resorted to using the background graphics for rendering the back end of the tail. While it works to some degree, obviously there are some issues with the alignment here that the AI (Claude) couldn’t get exactly right. As such, Claude has made a bunch of pre-configured background tiles that it will use depending on what direction the snake is moving in, but as you can see it is not quite perfect yet. Here I am at an end and I’m currently not able to improve it any beyond this point, so while the game is perfectly playable to those easily amused and with good imaginations much is yet to be desired and as I very much would like to get this game working perfectly I would kindly ask that if you are able to help me in improving this, feel free to find the source code on Github and make a pull request with changes or just any suggestions I would also really appreciate. Thank you for reading and please enjoy the links below!
Yours truly,
Simen Russnes
Find the source code here:
https://github.com/russnes/pizza_snake
Download the game here:
https://github.com/russnes/pizza_snake/releases/download/0.0.1/pizzasnake.sfc