A pixel-art snake game that turns the world's most famous skylines into your playground.
COVID Serpentis started as a joke during a long, gray afternoon in early 2026. The classic Snake game has been remade thousands of times — on calculators, on Nokia phones, on smartwatches, even inside browser dev tools. The mechanic is so primitive that almost any twist on it counts as a fresh take. So I asked a simple question: what if the snake wasn't a snake?
The answer, after about ten minutes of doodling, was a coronavirus — a spiky red blob with cartoon eyes. From there the rest of the design wrote itself. Cells became food. Vaccines became enemies. Antibodies became a second tier of threat. Quarantine zones became impassable walls. The snake grew not because you ate apples, but because you successfully infected a host.
The whole thing is, obviously, played for laughs. It's a small arcade joke, not a statement. The pandemic is over. Treating its imagery as material for a goofy retro game feels like the cultural equivalent of finally being able to laugh at something difficult — a tiny, low-stakes way of putting a strange period of recent history behind us.
The original prototype just had a black grid background. It worked, but it was forgettable. Every snake game ever made looks like that. The breakthrough was realizing that the canvas was a stage, not a board — and once you think of it that way, you start asking what the backdrop should be.
The answer turned out to be city skylines. Each time the snake exits one edge of the play field and enters the other, it doesn't just wrap around: it boards an airplane and flies to the next city. The screen swaps from the lights of Manhattan to the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, then to the foggy Thames at night, then across the Pacific to San Francisco's bay, on to neon-lit Tokyo, the gold haze of Dubai, and finally Hong Kong's harbour. Then back to New York.
Every skyline is hand-drawn directly to the HTML5 Canvas in code. There are no images, no SVGs, no sprite sheets. Each landmark is constructed out of simple primitives: rectangles for buildings, triangles for spires, bezier curves for bridge cables, randomized lit windows. This means the entire game weighs essentially nothing and loads instantly. It also means each city has a distinct mood — the cool blues of Paris and London, the deep magenta nights of Tokyo, the dust-orange haze over Dubai.
COVID Serpentis is a single HTML file. There is no build step, no bundler, no dependencies, no framework. The entire game — every animation, every city skyline, every enemy AI — lives in roughly 1,500 lines of vanilla JavaScript and inline CSS, drawn onto a 500×500 canvas at 60 frames per second.
That decision was deliberate. Modern web games tend to ship megabytes of code before the first pixel appears. A snake game has no business doing that. Keeping everything in one file means the project is easy to audit, easy to fork, and easy to deploy: copy one file to a static host and you're done.
The font, Press Start 2P, is a free Google Font that imitates the chunky bitmap typography of late-1980s arcade machines. The color palette is deliberately narrow: deep navy for the night sky, hot red for the virus, amber for cell windows, and cold electric blue for the vaccines. Everything is tuned so that the most important objects on screen — the virus head and the vaccines — read instantly even at small sizes.
Particle effects appear when the snake eats a cell or takes damage. They're not gratuitous. They give every interaction a small, satisfying physical feedback that makes the game feel responsive in a way pure grid-based snake games rarely do.
If you'd like to learn how the controls and mechanics work, head over to the How to Play guide. If you've already played a few rounds and want to chase a higher score, the Strategy page covers the tactics that separate a 200-point run from a 2,000-point run. Or just jump straight into the game — that's what it's there for.