Nibbles (video game)

Lore & Background

Nibbles was written in QBasic by Microsoft employees (often credited to Ron Nicholson or others) as part of the QBasic sample programs. The game was included with MS-DOS version 5.0 and above as one of the programs demonstrating the QBasic programming language. Microsoft's 24kB QBasic version was copyrighted in 1990.

The game's objective is to navigate a virtual snake through a walled space while consuming numbers from 1 through 9. The player must avoid colliding with walls, other snakes, or their own snake. The snake's length increases with each number consumed, making the game more difficult over time. After the last number is eaten, the player progresses to the next level with more complex obstacles and increased speed. A multiplayer mode allows a second player to control a second snake using a different set of keys on the same keyboard.

The QBasic game uses the standard 80x25 text mode, with the snake confined to a smaller play area within that grid. It renders its graphics using IBM PC extended ASCII characters (e.g., block characters like U+2588, U+2584), not ANSI escape sequences.

Reader's Guide

Nibbles holds significance as a widely distributed demonstration of the QBasic programming language, bundled with MS-DOS version 5.0 and above. Its inclusion on nearly every IBM PC compatible in the early 1990s made it one of the most accessible snake game variants of the era. The game's technical implementation—using the standard 80x25 text screen to emulate an 80x50 grid through foreground and background colors and ANSI block characters—showcased the capabilities of QBasic within the constraints of text-mode displays. As a learning tool, Nibbles introduced many users to basic game programming concepts. Its legacy is tied to the prevalence of MS-DOS and the role of bundled software in shaping early PC gaming experiences. The game is often mentioned alongside other QBasic demonstration games such as Gorillas and DONKEY.BAS.

Did You Know?

• Nibbles was written in QBasic by Microsoft employees (often credited to Ron Nicholson or others) as part of the QBasic sample programs.
• The game uses the standard 80x25 text mode, with the snake confined to a smaller play area within that grid, and renders graphics using IBM PC extended ASCII characters (e.g., block characters like U+2588, U+2584), not A
• Nibbles was included with MS-DOS version 5.0 and above, making it available on almost every IBM PC compatible in the early 1990s.
• The game features a multiplayer mode allowing a second player to control a second snake using different keys on the same keyboard.

The Birth of a Genre

The snake video game genre traces its roots to 1976, when Gremlin Industries released Blockade, written by Lane Hauck and Ago Kiss. This competitive arcade title pitted two players against each other, each steering a continuously moving line that grew longer over time. The objective was straightforward: survive longer than your opponent while avoiding walls and the rival's trail. Blockade and its immediate clones, such as Bigfoot Bonkers released the same year, were purely abstract in presentation and never invoked snake terminology. The concept gradually evolved into single-player variants where a line with a distinct head and tail elongated with each piece of food consumed, typically apples or eggs, thereby increasing the risk of self-collision. This shift from competitive abstraction to solo survival laid the groundwork for the hundreds of snake-themed titles that would follow across decades and platforms, many of which carried the word snake or worm in their titles.

Nibbles' Distinctive Arcade Design

Released in 1982, Nibbles carved out a distinctive niche within the rapidly growing snake game landscape. Unlike the two-player competitive format of its ancestor Blockade, Nibbles was a single-player arcade experience. What set it apart from contemporaries like Snake Byte, which featured a snake consuming apples to complete levels, or the BBC Micro's Snake by Dave Bresnen, which accelerated in speed as the line grew, was Nibbles' tight maze-fitting design. The snake was constrained to navigate a compact maze structure, and the overall pace of gameplay was notably faster than most other snake designs of the era. This combination of spatial constraint and elevated speed created a distinct tension: players had less reaction time within a more confined playing field. Nibbles also existed alongside the 1982 Tron arcade game's Light Cycles segment, which brought its own thematic flavor to the same core mechanic of steering a growing line to avoid self-collision.

A Decade in the Background: MS-DOS and the QBasic Era

While Nibbles debuted as an arcade title in 1982, its most enduring presence came not from the arcade floor but from the desktop. Beginning in 1991, Nibbles was bundled with MS-DOS as a QBasic sample program, a role it held for a period of time. This placement meant that millions of computer users encountered the game not as a deliberate purchase but as a built-in demonstration of what the QBasic programming language could produce. It sat alongside other snake-adjacent titles of the era, such as Rattler Race, which appeared in the second Microsoft Entertainment Pack in 1992 and introduced enemy snakes into the familiar apple-eating formula. The inclusion of Nibbles in such a ubiquitous operating system ensured that the snake mechanic remained visible to a broad audience well into the early 1990s, bridging the gap between the arcade heyday of the early 1980s and the mobile-phone resurgence that would arrive a few years later.

The Nokia Resurgence and the Snake Concept's Modern Afterlife

The snake genre experienced a dramatic second wind in 1998 when Nokia preloaded a game simply called Snake onto the Nokia 6110 mobile phone. The title's popularity prompted Nokia to release a long series of reiterations, including Snake II, Snake EX, Snake EX2, Snake III, Snakes, Snake Xenzia, and Snakes Subsonic, though the franchise gradually lost appeal as graphics and gameplay evolved. The concept's cultural persistence continued well beyond mobile: in 2016, Steve Howse launched Slither.io to mimic Agar.io's success, and Kooapps released Snake.io, which later appeared on Apple Arcade, Netflix, and Nintendo Switch. Google wove Snake into its ecosystem through YouTube's hidden player game, a 2013 browser doodle, a 2019 Google Maps April Fools' prank, and a Chrome browser game. In 2025, Spotify embedded Snake in long playlists, Nothing launched a Snake widget for its phones, and Tidepool Games shipped MageTrain, a roguelike snake title. The genre's simplicity ensures its adaptability across every new platform.

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