Very interesting. What inspired you to build this, I'd love to hear the story behind this.
Actually, i don't remember! Sorry, it's been a while (a decade, it seems... oh well)
This is probably my mind retro-creating a story, but i think this started with me wondering about how the Braille system worked. Like, did each Braille symbol map to a single letter, or to a whole syllable, or even a concept? Or, were more than one Braille symbol needed for some letters, like Morse?
Turns out each Braille symbol fits within a 2x4 grid of points. That's 2 possible states (point is on or off) for each of those 8 points. So 2^8 = 256 possible values. That's a byte! And luckily, Unicode encodes all those 256 possible values, and maps them to codepoints in a very systematic way.
So obviously, i started to wonder what kind of things could be represented on these Braille grids. The snake game was a natural fit, and a fun programming experience. But i also considered other things, like a horizontal Tetris. Or a Game of Life rendered on the URL, which i actually implemented(1), but i didn't find as entertaining as snake, because the 4-tile height restriction impeded any interesting patterns, like gliders (even with wrap-around logic). I think i even made some brute-force searching for horizontal or diagonal gliders trying out different born/survive rules(2), but couldn't find any interesting patterns, other than still life, blinkers, and some "moving walls" kind of things.
Anyways, that's for the Braille part. The idea of using the address bar to render the game, i have no idea where that came from TBH. Maybe i stole the idea from some other animated or pretty thing on URLs? I wish i remembered.
(1): https://github.com/epidemian/URLife
(2): See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-like_cellular_automaton. The Game of Life rabbit hole goes deep.