Every Version of Snake, Ranked

The snake game genre has been around for nearly 50 years. What started as a two-player arcade cabinet in 1976 became one of the most widely played game concepts in history, peaking when Nokia put it on 400 million phones. Along the way, dozens of versions appeared across arcades, home computers, consoles, feature phones, and smartphones.

Not all of them are equally worth remembering. Some introduced mechanics that shaped every version after them. Some were technical showcases for new hardware. Some were forgettable clones. This ranking covers the nine most significant versions of Snake ever released, judged on three criteria: how well the game played on its original hardware, what it contributed to the genre, and how many people it actually reached.

9. Snake Xenzia (2005), the farewell tour

Snake Xenzia shipped on Nokia's S40 platform phones in the mid-2000s. It was essentially a repackaged version of the original Snake with slightly updated graphics and a new name. The gameplay was identical to Armanto's 1997 design: four-directional movement, wall collisions, growing tail.

Xenzia is ranked last not because it was bad, but because it added nothing. By 2005, Snake II and Snake III had already expanded the formula with screen wrapping, obstacles, and color graphics. Xenzia was a nostalgia product, a way for Nokia to keep the original experience available on newer hardware. It served that purpose fine, but it did not move the genre forward.

That said, Xenzia reached an enormous audience. Nokia's S40 phones sold in the hundreds of millions, particularly in developing markets. For many people in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, Snake Xenzia was their first video game. Its cultural importance outweighs its design importance.

8. Slither.io (2016), the multiplayer evolution

Slither.io is not technically a Snake game. It is a massively multiplayer browser game where players control a growing worm on a shared playing field, competing against hundreds of other players in real time. But it borrowed Snake's core mechanic (move, eat, grow, avoid crashing) so directly that any history of the genre has to include it.

Created by Steve Howse, Slither.io launched in March 2016 and became one of the most-played browser games of the year. At its peak, it had over 67 million daily active users. The game proved that the snake concept could work as a competitive multiplayer experience, not just a solo score chase.

It ranks lower on this list because it changed the fundamental nature of the game. Classic Snake is a puzzle of spatial planning against yourself. Slither.io is a competitive arena game against other humans. Both are valid, but they scratch very different itches. The design lineage is clear, but the experience is fundamentally different.

7. Blockade (1976), where it all began

Blockade, released by Gremlin Industries in October 1976, is the earliest known game built around the growing-trail mechanic. Two players each controlled a line on screen, leaving a permanent trail behind them. The goal was to force your opponent into a wall or a trail. The last player standing won.

Blockade was a two-player competitive game, not the single-player food chase that later versions became. There was no food to collect and no score to accumulate. The game was purely about spatial strategy and trapping your opponent. The cabinet used a simple black-and-white display and four-directional joysticks.

It ranks in the middle because its contribution to the genre is foundational (it invented the core mechanic) but the game itself was limited by its era. Blockade was a coin-operated arcade machine with no single-player mode and no progression. It planted the seed, but the versions that followed cultivated it into something richer. For more on how Snake traveled from the arcade to the Nokia 6110, the full history covers the 20-year journey in detail.

6. Surround (1978) and Hustle (1977), bringing the trail home

After Blockade proved the concept in arcades, home versions followed quickly. Atari released Surround for the Atari 2600 in 1978, and Gremlin themselves released Hustle as an arcade follow-up in 1977 that added a food-collection element to the trail mechanic.

Hustle is particularly notable because it introduced the idea of eating dots to grow, which is the mechanic that defines Snake as we know it. Blockade had the trail. Hustle added the food. That combination became the template for every subsequent version. Surround brought the concept into living rooms for the first time, proving it worked outside the arcade.

Neither game was a blockbuster. The Atari 2600 had a library of over 500 games, and Surround was not among the most popular. Hustle competed for arcade floor space against Space Invaders and lost. But together, they bridged the gap between Blockade's pure trail mechanic and the food-collection gameplay that later versions would perfect.

5. Worm (1978 to 1982), the home computer versions

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, variants of the snake concept appeared on home computers under names like Worm and Snake. Versions existed for the TRS-80, the Apple II, the BBC Micro, and the Commodore 64. Several were published in computer magazines as type-in programs, meaning users copied the code by hand from printed pages.

These versions were the first single-player snake games. Instead of competing against another player, you controlled a worm navigating a field of food, growing longer with each piece consumed, and trying to avoid your own increasingly long body. This is the formula that Snake on the Nokia 6110 would later perfect.

The home computer Worm variants rank here because they established the single-player template, but each one reached a relatively small audience. Home computers in the early 1980s were hobbyist devices. The people playing Worm on a TRS-80 were a self-selected group of technology enthusiasts, not a mass-market audience.

4. Snake III / Snake EX (2003), Snake in color

Snake III (also marketed as Snake EX on some devices) arrived on Nokia's Symbian S60 smartphones in 2003. For the first time, the snake was rendered in full color on screens that measured 176 by 208 pixels or larger. The game added themed environments (garden, ocean, desert), multiple food types with different point values, and a progression system across levels.

The transition to color and larger screens changed the game's character. Snake III felt less like a minimalist puzzle and more like an actual video game, with production values that tried to match what Game Boy Advance titles offered at the time. The core mechanic was still recognizably Snake, but the presentation had evolved significantly.

Snake III ranks above the earlier home computer versions because of its reach (Symbian phones sold over 100 million units) and because it proved the Snake concept could scale up without losing its appeal. But it ranks below the entries that follow because the added complexity made it less elegant. The original's power came from having nothing to strip away. Snake III added things to strip away.

3. NIBBLES.BAS (1991), Snake for the DOS generation

NIBBLES.BAS shipped with MS-DOS 5.0 in 1991 as a sample QBasic program. It was a text-mode snake game that rendered the snake and food using colored ASCII characters on an 80 by 25 text grid. It supported one or two players and included multiple levels with wall layouts that changed as you progressed.

NIBBLES.BAS reached an enormous audience by accident. MS-DOS 5.0 shipped on millions of PCs, and NIBBLES.BAS was included as a programming example, not as a product. But people found it, played it, and in many cases it was the first computer game they encountered. It was also the first snake game that many aspiring programmers took apart and modified, making it a gateway to game development for a generation of coders.

The ranking here reflects both its reach and its influence. NIBBLES.BAS did not invent anything new mechanically, but it brought the snake concept to mainstream PC users for the first time. It also established the “pre-installed game that people discover by accident” pattern that Nokia would replicate with far greater effect six years later.

2. Snake II (2000), the refinement

Snake II launched on the Nokia 3310 in 2000, one of the best-selling mobile phones in history with over 126 million units sold. It kept the original's core gameplay but added several meaningful enhancements: screen wrapping (the snake could exit one edge and appear on the opposite side), obstacle levels, bonus food items, and a choice of difficulty settings.

Screen wrapping was the most significant change. In the original Snake, the walls were lethal boundaries. In Snake II, the edges became portals. This single change opened up entirely new strategies and made the game feel less claustrophobic at high scores. It also made the game more forgiving for beginners, since running into a wall no longer ended the game instantly.

Snake II is the version that most people over 30 remember playing. The Nokia 3310 was ubiquitous in the early 2000s, especially in Europe and Asia. If you ask someone to picture “the snake game,” they are usually picturing Snake II on the 3310, with its slightly larger screen and smoother movement.

It ranks second because it is an excellent refinement of a great design. But refinement is not creation. The strategies that work on Snake were established by the original. Snake II polished them.

1. Snake on the Nokia 6110 (1997), the one that mattered most

The original Snake, as created by Taneli Armanto for the Nokia 6110 in 1997, is the most important version of Snake ever made. Not because it was the first (it was not), and not because it had the best features (later versions added more). It ranks first because it combined the right game with the right platform at the right time, and in doing so changed what a mobile phone could be.

The game ran on an 84 by 48 pixel monochrome display. It used the phone's number keys for directional input: 2 for up, 4 for left, 6 for right, 8 for down. The snake was rendered as dark pixel blocks on the green LCD background. There were no levels, no difficulty settings, no power-ups. Just a snake, food, walls, and your own growing tail.

That simplicity was its power. Every element served the gameplay. The design principles behind its addictive quality (instant comprehension, short sessions, visible progress, fair difficulty) emerged from the hardware constraints, not from a design document. The 84 by 48 pixel screen forced clarity. The limited memory forced elegance. The numeric keypad forced four-directional simplicity.

Snake on the Nokia 6110 proved that a mobile phone could be a gaming platform. It reached over 400 million devices. It was the first video game that hundreds of millions of people ever played. And its influence runs through every mobile game that followed, from Java ME titles to App Store hits to the hypercasual games of today.

Every version of Snake that came after it, including every entry on this list, exists because of what Armanto built in 1997. The genre started with Blockade. But the phenomenon started with the Nokia 6110.

Playing the original today

You do not need a Nokia 6110 to experience the game that defined the genre. This browser recreation preserves the 1997 original with pixel-perfect accuracy: the same two-tone LCD palette, the same grid dimensions, the same speed curves, and the same wall-collision rules that Armanto designed. The how to play guide covers the controls and difficulty modes, and the leaderboard tracks the highest scores from players around the world.