Snood

Snood was created by Dave Dobson, a geologist who went on to teach earth science at Guilford College in North Carolina for over two decades. He first released it for the Mac in 1996 as shareware — by his own telling, originally written as a gift for his wife. The gameplay was openly in the mold of Taito's arcade hit Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move): aim a launcher at a board of hanging pieces, fire, and match three or more to drop them — except the pieces were Snoods, a cast of goofy, grimacing pixel faces, and instead of a strict timer the ceiling ratcheted down as punishment for wasted shots.

The Windows port arrived in 1999, and that's when Snood conquered its true habitat: the college dorm and the campus computer lab. It became one of the most popular shareware games of the early-internet era — over 200,000 registered copies sold, a serious number for a pass-along shareware title — and a fixture of the AIM-era procrastination loop: away message up, Snood window open, essay abandoned. The pops and boings of a clearing board were the ambient soundtrack of a certain kind of 1999–2003 all-nighter. Even Steve Wozniak has named it a favorite.

Snood kept traveling — a Game Boy Advance version in 2001, an iPhone release in 2009 — but its real home never changed: a beige lab PC with a half-written paper minimized underneath. It stands as one of the great unlikely software stories of its time — a geology professor's side project that out-lingered thousands of commercial games, one procrastinated afternoon at a time.