It was once the go-to game on old Nokia phones, and now you can now play a very different — and very wet — version of the arcade classic Snake, right in the heart of London.
The Granary Squirt app, available on iOS and Android, controls the public water fountains in London’s Granary Square. What’s more, you can use it to play a giant game of Snake with up to eight players, each controlling a line of water jets on this public piece of art.
It’s not the first time that gaming has blasted into public spaces in recent years — we’ve also seen Snake on the sides of buildings and Tetris on a 29-story Philadelphia skyscraper — and it shows how ingrained the world of gaming has become in mainstream culture.
Players at Granary Square use their mobile phones to control the water jets on one of the four giant fountains, tilting to move their own line forward, backward, left, or right. They need to avoid the sides of the fountain and other snakes, which must get pretty tricky when eight players are involved at the same time. At night, the different lines are illuminated, and it looks pretty darn cool.
You can watch the fountains in action in this video: