The History of Snake

Before Nokia: The Origins of Snake

The Snake game concept is older than most people realize. The earliest known Snake-like video game was Blockade, an arcade cabinet released by Gremlin Industries in 1976. In Blockade, two players each controlled a line that grew longer with every move, leaving a permanent trail behind. The objective was to force your opponent to crash into a trail while avoiding collisions yourself. It was simple, competitive, and deeply engaging.

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, the concept evolved across platforms. Variations appeared on mainframe computers, early personal computers, and the BBC Micro under names like Worm, Nibbles, and Rattler Race. QBasic, shipped with MS-DOS 5.0 in 1991, included a version called NIBBLES.BAS that introduced many PC users to the genre. But none of these versions achieved mass cultural penetration — they remained niche experiences known primarily to hobbyist programmers and early computer owners.

1997: Taneli Armanto and the Nokia 6110

The version of Snake that would become a global phenomenon was programmed by Taneli Armanto, a Finnish software engineer working at Nokia in the mid-1990s. Nokia tasked Armanto with creating built-in games for their upcoming Nokia 6110 business phone. He developed three titles: Snake, Memory, and Logic.

The Nokia 6110, released in December 1997, was a GSM phone targeted at business professionals. Its monochrome display measured just 84 by 48 pixels — a tiny canvas by any standard. Armanto designed Snake to work within these extreme constraints. The game used a two-tone color scheme: dark pixels on a green-tinted LCD background, creating the iconic visual style that millions would come to recognize instantly.

The gameplay was elegantly simple. The player used the phone's numeric keypad (2 for up, 8 for down, 4 for left, 6 for right) to steer a line around the screen. Eating a food pellet made the snake grow longer by one segment and awarded points. The snake moved continuously, and the game ended if the snake hit a wall or its own body. Speed increased gradually as the score climbed, creating a natural difficulty curve.

The Perfect Mobile Game

What made Snake special was not its novelty — the concept was already twenty years old. What made it special was the context. In 1997, there was no App Store, no mobile internet to speak of, and no way to install software on a phone. Snake was simply there, pre-loaded on every Nokia 6110 sold worldwide. There was zero friction between a person buying a phone and playing their first game.

The game was also perfectly matched to its use case. Games lasted one to three minutes — ideal for waiting rooms, bus stops, and lunch breaks. The controls used the existing keypad, requiring no additional hardware. The game drained minimal battery. And the loop was deeply satisfying: easy to learn, hard to master, and fast enough to restart that “just one more game” became inevitable.

Nokia recognized the value and began including Snake on virtually every handset they manufactured. By the early 2000s, Nokia dominated the global mobile phone market with over 30 percent market share, and Snake was installed on every single device. The game reached people in every country, across every age group and economic bracket — anywhere Nokia phones were sold, Snake was played.

Snake II and Beyond

In 2000, Nokia released Snake II on the iconic Nokia 3310. This sequel introduced several new features: the snake could wrap around screen edges (exiting the right side of the screen and appearing on the left), maze-like obstacles appeared at higher levels, and bonus food items offered extra points. The Nokia 3310 went on to sell over 126 million units, making Snake II one of the most distributed games ever created.

As Nokia transitioned to color-screen phones, Snake continued to evolve. Snake III (also called Snake Xenzia) brought improved color graphics and additional game modes to Symbian-powered Nokia smartphones. The core gameplay remained unchanged — the familiar four-directional movement and growing tail were always recognizable — but each version took advantage of improved hardware capabilities.

When HMD Global relaunched the Nokia brand in 2017, they included an updated Snake on the Nokia 3310 reboot, acknowledging the game's enduring cultural significance. In 2019, Nokia partnered with Facebook to release a multiplayer Snake experience on Messenger, introducing the classic game to a generation of players who had never owned a Nokia phone.

Cultural Impact by the Numbers

The scale of Snake's reach is difficult to overstate. Between 1997 and 2007, Nokia shipped over 400 million phones with Snake pre-installed. Industry analysts estimate at least 350 million unique users played some version of the game during that period. At its peak in the early 2000s, more people were playing Snake daily than any other video game in the world.

Snake fundamentally shaped how people thought about mobile gaming. It proved that a phone could be an entertainment device, not just a communication tool. The success of Snake on Nokia phones directly influenced the development of Java ME (J2ME) mobile gaming, which enabled downloadable games on later handsets. Without Snake demonstrating the market for mobile games, the trajectory toward smartphone app stores might have looked very different.

Why Snake Still Matters

Snake occupies a unique position in gaming history. It was not the first Snake game, nor was it the most technically advanced. But it was the game that proved mobile phones could be gaming platforms. It reached more people than any console game of its era. And for millions of people around the world, it was their very first video game experience.

The nostalgia surrounding Snake is not merely aesthetic — it represents a simpler relationship with technology. A phone that lasted a week on a single charge. A game with no microtransactions, no ads, no notifications. Just a snake, some food, and the challenge of beating your own high score.

This recreation brings that experience to the modern web. The pixel-perfect game engine runs inside a photorealistic retro phone frame, preserving the two-tone LCD aesthetic that defined the original. You can play it right now in your browser, compete on the global leaderboard, and share your scores with friends. New to the game? Check out our complete guide on how to play or browse the FAQ for more about the game's history and features.