Blockade

The first snake game is not the one most people are familiar with, and probably won't hold your attention for very long, but Blockade was sufficiently revolutionary to spawn multiple imitators within a year of its release (e.g., Barricade, Dominos, Bigfoot Bonkers)

In Blockade, two players each control a snake that grows with every step. The goal is to force your opponent to "crash", either into a wall or into the body of one of the snakes.

The snakes move rather sluggishly and the game gets tedious very quickly. Of course, this is also true of most modern versions of the game, so it's hard to fault Gremlin too much for this.

In the following year, Gremlin would release a 4-player variant (CoMotion) and a single-player variant (Hustle), the latter of which is the closest to what we now recognize as "Snake".

It's always nice to see the first itteration of the Snake game, that yet still hanged in its infacy and the competitive mentality that was boosted by the 2-player Pong. It is novel to try to trick your opponent into crashing into a wall, but after a few plays it would amount to just striking out math, just like you'd do with naughts and crosses. It does have a nice explosive sound when a player dies, and props for Sega being the publisher.