NES SnakeRattle N Roll

Snake Rattle N Roll is a 1990 NES release developed by Rare and published by Nintendo, an isometric platformer built around two snakes eating enough Nibbley Pibbleys to hit the weight threshold and move on. Cart only, no manual, no box.

Rare in 1990 was operating at a different speed than most licensees on the NES. The British studio had already put out Slalom, R.C. Pro-Am, and Cobra Triangle, all games that pushed the hardware in ways that felt genuinely strange on a platform where most third-party work was conservative. Snake Rattle N Roll belongs to that run. The isometric camera was borrowed from the same Q*bert-adjacent geometry those developers had been playing with across British arcade culture in the mid-1980s, but Rare bent it into something stranger: a game about eating, growing, and racing to a scale before a time limit hits. The two-player co-op mode is where this one lives. One player runs Rattle, the other runs Roll, and the snakes share a screen that gets increasingly chaotic as the levels compound. Rare would go on to define a large portion of the N64 library later in the decade, but this NES period is where you watch them figure out how to make a console work harder than the manufacturer intended.

The cartridge here is standard grey NES shell, which is correct for a Nintendo-published domestic release. The label shows the red snake grinning wide with the blue companion behind it, rendered in that deliberately goofy Rare house style that defined their early Nintendo partnership. Cart-only copies of this one are the common find; complete-in-box examples are significantly less so, and this is presented honestly as cart only. No cracking on the shell is visible, and the label reads clean without peel at the edges. Run your thumb along the cartridge connector pins before you slot it in.

OWNER VERIFY: Confirm the 1990 production year against the copyright notice printed on the cartridge label or molded into the underside of the shell.