Q&A
David McCullough Dobson
Q and A with Creator of Snood, David McCullough Dobson
Were you into computer games as a child? Now? Which ones?
Yes, definitely – I was just about the perfect age to experience the beginnings of video games. When I was eight or nine, the first widespread video games became available (e.g. Pong, Combat). They mostly worked on TV sets and were black and white with big chunky pixels. There were some coin-operated arcade-style games, too, which were fun – I used to beg for quarters from my parents all the time. As I went through my teenage years, I rode the wave of video game popularity, spending lots of my time and much of my meager income at video arcades, which were much more widespread then than they are now. I also developed a strong interest in game programming, and I did that as a hobby throughout junior high and high school and then into college and graduate school.
My favorite games – that’s hard, because I like so many of them. Old ones that I loved were Front Line, Bosconian, and of course Space Invaders and the like. There are many computer games I’ve enjoyed, with Wizard’s Crown, Civilization, and definitely Warcraft II being favorites. In graduate school, I fell hard for Street Fighter II and for Marathon (a Macintosh game). I like puzzle games, from simple ones, like Tetris, to more complex ones, like Myst. I play some Quake, HalfLife, and Counterstrike now. But my favorite computer game of all time has to be Nethack, a free game that’s been around since the beginning of computers. I lose about a week every year to that game.
How did you become interested in computer programming?
Back in elementary school, actually. The school got a Commodore PET, which was a very simple computer. It had no disk drives – you used casette tapes to store programs and data. My friends and I used to sign up for 15 minute time slots on the computer after school to play games, but I eventually got curious as to how the games worked, and I started using my slots to fiddle with the programs (they were in BASIC, so you could alter them pretty easily).
My dad bought one of the first IBM PC’s when I was about 14, and I spent lots and lots of my free time programming simple games on it. I even detassled corn (fairly strenuous field work) one summer to earn enough money to buy a color monitor (a 4-color CGA one).
When did you create Snood?
It was in graduate school, in 1995, when I made the first prototype of it. I had been working on a fairly elaborate puzzle game, and I was planning to put a snood-like game in as one of the puzzles to solve. This was a DOS-based program, and I never really finished it, although my wife and family really liked playing the Snood part.
What was your inspiration? How did you first think up the game?
There had been a number of neat little puzzle games out by then, including Minesweeper, Tetris, Bust a Move, and others, and in the grand tradition of video game design, I borrowed heavily from these. I wanted to make a game like those, that was fun but would be complex enough to hold people’s interest. I also wanted to make the game not timed, and make it like solitaire games so that you could get a different layout every time.
What was your inspiration for the various puzzle levels and characters?
The puzzle levels took a lot of work, to make them fun and challenging without being impossible. Some of them I took from stuff I’d been thinking of or places I’d visited; others I just started with a simple concept and developed it. Some I designed to require particular skills or planning by the player. The characters were pretty easy to design. I was limited in that they all needed to be roughly square, or fit into a square. I wanted to make sure I used different shapes and colors to make them easy to distinguish. I also wanted to give them different personalities (well, as much of a personality as a little thing like that can have).
Are the characters named after/made to look like anyone you know?
The names came from an Internet poll I did in 1996-7, so all the names were voted on and picked by Snood players, although some of the names (e.g. Zod, Spike) were ones that I tossed in the ring. As far as I know, they don’t look like any real people, although some people tell me the gray one looks like Richard Nixon.
Are any characters more evil than the others?
Well, some people ascribe evil to Bonehead, the skull Snood, since he shows up when you lose. Some people are actually scared of Zod (the red one). But I don’t think any of them are really evil.
When/How did Snood begin to catch on?
It grew in popularity throughout the second half of 1996 – I released it as a Macintosh-only game in May of that year. I did most of my publicity over Usenet, an internet bulletin board system, and I set up a web site for Snood, too. A couple of computer magazines put Snood on their cover CDs, and that helped a lot. By the middle of 1997, I was getting about 500-1000 downloads a day.
Where does the word “Snood” come from, and why did you use it to title your game?
This is kind of geeky – I have been in a fantasy football league for the past seven years, and one of the other teams in the league is named Snood Trunion. I have no idea why that guy picked those words – Snood is a word for a hair net, and Trunion is a kind of fish, I think. I was looking for a word that was silly and not trademarked, and Snood was floating around in my head then.
What do you think makes Snood so addictive?
I think it’s the fact that the task you have to do is very simple, but the decisions you have to make are more complex. I think it’s also that there’s no clock to race against or aliens shooting at you, so you can play at your own pace. I think there’s also the element of aiming carefully – many popular pastimes involve that skill (darts, bowling, baseball, pool, etc.)
How many versions were there before the current one? What improved from version to version?
The first version 1.0, released in May 1996, was Macintosh only and didn’t have the puzzle levels. It also had some bugs, so I released version 1.1 shortly thereafter. I added the Puzzle levels in version 2.0, still for Mac only. I wrote the first PC version (for DOS) in 1998, and made it with the same features as the Mac version 2.0. I updated both version to 2.1 and added the Journey level and high score verification for the World High Score Page. I finished a Windows-based 2.1 version in 1999, and then
in November 2000 I did a Windows version 2.2 (now 2.2.3 to fix some problems). This newest version has some new features like an Aimer, a Mulligan, and specific game numbers you can pick to get a particular game when you want it. Given the improvements in computers recently, I also needed to re-do the sounds and add bigger graphics to let Snood use the whole screen.
Do you have any plans for another version with different levels/ features?
We’re always working on new ideas, and in fact many of them come from user suggestions. I’m hoping to improve the screen graphics and animations and add some special Snoods with cool powers to the next one, and a Turbo mode where the Snoods just keep shooting without you clicking.
How many people registered for Snood last year? Why would people register when they can play the game for free?
From 1997-2000, the average was about 5-10 registrations per day. With the release of the new PC version at the end of last year, that’s picked up some. Most people don’t register – about 99.5% to be exact. The past month or so, we’ve had about 25,000 downloads of Snood per week from Snood.Com, but the registrations are only a tiny fraction of that.
Bonus: How is Snood a metaphor for life?
Whoa, that’s deep! 
I think any wisdom people get from Snood has to really come from themselves – Snood only helps people achieve a Zen-like state in which all realities are possible.
