I have a rather primitive cell phone compared to other technophiles. It’s a slim Nokia with a black and white screen–a hand-me-down from Tippy’s brother. I have no complaints; the phone itself allows me to place calls, and that’s all I ever need from it. But once in a while when I’m bored, I’ll play some old school games on my cell. One of my favorites is Snake. I originally knew this game back in the old Basic programming days as “Nibbles”.

The premise is simple: you navigate a snake around the playing field, eating the little pellets. Each pellet makes your snake longer. You die if the snake ever touches the walls or itself (if this were true in real life, the snake population would be devastated). It’s a fun little game that takes my attention away from boring situations. This is all well and good, except for one problem. The high score attained by Tippy’s brother was insanely high at around 800. Ever since getting the phone, this had annoyed me. Let’s just say it’s a bit of an ego deflator to have a high score on your phone that wasn’t achieved by yourself.

I was on a quest to defeat this score.

This proved to be quite difficult. At first, I tried playing at the highest possible level (9), which means the snake moves really fast, but each pellet provides more points. Therefore, I could theoretically attain more points in less time. But I found that the snake moved much too fast to navigate safely when the snake is long. I decided to lower the level to 6 and enjoy higher finger tapping precision at a cost of lower points per pellet.

Next, I calculated how long the snake would have to be before I reached the high score. I concluded that the snake would take up most of the playing field. I realized that I needed a plan: I couldn’t simply arbitrarily navigate my snake at such long lengths since I could easily trap myself. I decided to consistently wrap my snake from the bottom up in a weaving pattern that didn’t leave any empty spaces behind the snake. At long snake lengths, I preceded in this weaving fashion from bottom to top, and continuing by coming back down.

This was a successful strategy. But still, it required a level of concentration that is very intense. One wrong tap of the button and my snake would vanquish itself. There was no room for error since I wrapped my snake as tightly as possible. Needless to say, I spent many trials doing this, and failed.

Yesterday, the long quest was finally over. I was in the zone–my fingers were tapping in a good rhythm. I immediately knew that I had finally surpassed the 800 mark, but I continued. The snake grew ludicrously long, spanning almost the entire screen. I thought I would actually get to the point where I had no other space for my snake to travel into. However, I made a wrong crucial move near the end. But it didn’t matter; I broke the high score with 1036!

After a few seconds of euphoria, my heart immediately sank. I knew that defeating this score marked the end of my snake trials. I really did enjoy the insane finger frolicking, vexed by the high score.

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