It's always fun to see games running on machines that they have absolutely no business running on — like the original Half-Life running on an Android watch or Doom running on a graphing calculator, for example. Making old games run on all kinds of modern technology, no matter how small, isn't exactly new.
This latest example, however, is even crazier than usual. YouTuber Mythic Maniac has ported the classic arcade game Snake to his keyboard.
Yes, his keyboard. He's using a Corsair K70 RGB keyboard, which comes with plenty of bells and whistles, like pretty lights that can be fiddled around with. So, Mythic Maniac wrote some code in C++, and before you knew it, he could play Snake using his keyboard, except in a much different way than how people normally play Snake using a keyboard.
It works just like any other version of Snake, only the keyboard acts as the screen. The player controls a snake and tries to eat dots, but doing so makes the snake longer and longer. Then, the challenge is to see how long you can go before the Snake eats its own tail, at which point, you lose. Considering how little space is on a keyboard, it's safe to assume that these games of Snake don't last too long. It becomes cramped very, very quickly.
Winning isn't really the point of this project, though. The point is that it can actually be done and that it's cool to see that it is indeed possible. Mythic Maniac has made the code available to download for anybody interested, though he does warn that, since he didn't actually originally intend to release the code, it could probably use some cleaning up. You can check out a video of the game in action below.
It's a crazy feat, to be sure. While playing Half-Life on an Android watch might still be more impressive (an Android watch!), the fact that the classic game is running without the actual use of a screen is pretty darn cool. How long before somebody brings Doom to the keyboard?
