Snakey Math

Snakey Math is an educational arcade game for classic Mac OS by Curry K. Software (Curry Kenworthy), distributed as shareware through Info-Mac and the developer's own site. The game wraps drill-and-practice arithmetic in a Snake-style action shell: up to four snakes (player- or CPU-controlled) crawl a single screen and race to eat the correct numeric answer to a posted math problem before opponents do.

Gameplay

Each round poses an arithmetic problem and scatters candidate answers across the play field. Players steer their snake with the keyboard toward the correct number; eating it scores points and grows the snake, while wrong answers stop the snake briefly and dock points. Wrong choices are removed so play continues until the correct answer is found, after which the right answer is highlighted as feedback. The game supports one to four players sharing one keyboard, with CPU snakes filling empty seats and pursuing nearby numbers to keep the pressure on. Operand ranges, negative numbers, and mixed operations are all selectable.

Engine and technical changes

This entry corresponds to Snakey Math 2.0 for classic Mac OS (the 68k/PPC build distributed as snakey-math-20.hqx). Version 2.0 added smoother problem transitions, two new power-ups, electric switches that reshape the play field, background music and photographic backdrops, and improved snake AI. A separate Mac OS X build was released in parallel.

Development and release

Curry K. Software, run by Curry Kenworthy, specialized in small educational and utility titles for Mac and Windows. Snakey Math was distributed as a shareware demo locked to multiplication tables 1-6, with a single-user license at $9.95 and a school site license at $99.95. The classic Mac 2.0 build is dated June 2004 in the Info-Mac archive, late in the Classic era.