// How to play
Press START (the big button on the sheet, next to the board). The snake runs on the nine-by-nine board of cells B2:J10 and wraps around its edges. Steer it with the four buttons beside the board: UP, <, > and Down. You cannot turn straight back, but two quick clicks can still fold the snake onto itself.
Each red apple is a point and makes the snake one cell longer. Every fifth apple a green monster appears and a countdown starts in K2. Eat the monster before it reaches zero and you score what is left on the counter. Running into your own body is GAME OVER. PAUSE and PLAY stop and restart the snake. On a touch screen, use the buttons under the window.
// Revisited
Rebuilt in HTML5 + JavaScript from the VBA inside the original workbook (module SNAKE_MOD, the sheet's PlayCB_Click and Workbook_Open, 2008). The game runs on the cells exactly as the macro drew it: Excel ColorIndex 5 (blue) for the body with a checkered head, 3 (red) for the apple and 4 (green) for the monster, a 200 ms step timed with GetTickCount and DoEvents. The column widths, row heights, fonts, border, 75% zoom and the positions of the five buttons are read from the workbook.
The original had no keyboard controls. The direction buttons were Forms buttons with the Up, Down, Left and Right macros assigned, so the port leaves the arrow keys alone too. The Excel window around the sheet (menus, toolbars, formula bar, tabs) is a reconstruction for show, in the style of the Spanish Excel the game was made with. Two changes: the snake pauses when you switch tabs, and the apple and the monster give up looking for a free cell if the board is ever completely full (the original macro would hang there).