Who Created the Snake Game? The Taneli Armanto Story

Taneli Armanto, a software engineer at Nokia in Finland, created the Snake game in 1997. He designed it as one of three pre-installed games for the Nokia 6110 business phone. The other two were Memory and Logic. Within a few years, Snake was on over 400 million phones worldwide, making it the most played mobile game in history up to that point.

The story of how Snake went from a minor feature on a business phone to a global phenomenon says as much about timing and constraints as it does about game design. Armanto did not set out to create something historic. He was given a brief, worked within extreme technical limitations, and built a game that happened to be exactly right for how people used their phones.

Who Is Taneli Armanto?

Taneli Armanto is a Finnish software engineer who worked at Nokia during the company's dominant years in the mobile phone industry. In the mid-1990s, Nokia was the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, headquartered in Espoo, Finland. Armanto was part of the team developing software for Nokia's consumer handsets.

Before Snake, Armanto was not a game developer. He was a general software engineer working on embedded systems for mobile devices. Nokia asked him to create a few small games that could be loaded onto the Nokia 6110, which was being positioned as a premium business phone. The games were meant to be a minor feature, not a selling point. No one at Nokia anticipated that one of them would become the most recognized mobile game in the world.

Armanto has kept a relatively low public profile despite creating one of the most widely played games ever made. In the few interviews he has given over the years, he has been characteristically modest about the game's impact, attributing much of its success to the sheer number of Nokia phones sold rather than to the game itself.

The Brief: Three Games for the Nokia 6110

In 1996, Nokia was preparing to launch the 6110, a phone aimed at business professionals. The device had a monochrome LCD display measuring 84 by 48 pixels, a 32-bit ARM processor, and limited onboard memory. Nokia wanted to include a few simple games as a quality-of-life feature. Not as a product differentiator, but as something users could do during idle moments.

Armanto was tasked with creating three games. He came up with Snake, Memory (a card-matching game), and Logic (a code-breaking puzzle similar to Mastermind). All three shipped with the Nokia 6110 when it launched in December 1997. Snake and Logic were new creations. Memory was based on the well-known matching game format.

The constraints were severe. The display could only show two states: pixels on (dark) or pixels off (the greenish LCD background). There was no grayscale, no color, and no backlight. The phone's processor and memory were optimized for voice calls and basic text messaging, not graphics rendering. Any game had to run without noticeably affecting the phone's primary functions or battery life.

Designing Within Extreme Constraints

The Nokia 6110's limitations shaped every design decision Armanto made. The 84 by 48 pixel display meant the game board had to be tiny. There was no room for elaborate graphics, menus, or instructions. The game had to be instantly understandable from the first second of play.

The input method was equally constrained. The Nokia 6110 had a standard numeric keypad, not a directional pad. Armanto mapped movement to the number keys: 2 for up, 8 for down, 4 for left, and 6 for right. These keys formed a rough cross shape on the keypad, which worked well enough for four-directional movement. Players could operate the game with one hand while holding the phone, which was important for a device designed to be used during commutes and in waiting rooms.

The two-tone display (dark pixels on a green background) became the game's defining visual characteristic. Every element, the snake, the food, the walls, was rendered as solid dark rectangles against the LCD green. That stark, high-contrast look was a technical necessity, but it also made the game immediately readable at any viewing angle and in almost any lighting condition. Years later, that same two-tone palette would become one of the most recognized visual signatures in gaming. You can see it preserved in this browser recreation of the original.

Why Armanto Chose the Snake Concept

Armanto did not invent the snake game genre. The concept dates back to 1976, when Gremlin Industries released Blockade, an arcade cabinet where two players each controlled a growing line and tried to force the other into a wall or trail. Over the next two decades, variations appeared under names like Worm, Nibbles, and Rattler Race on mainframe computers, the BBC Micro, and early PCs.

The most widely known pre-Nokia version was NIBBLES.BAS, a QBasic program that shipped with MS-DOS 5.0 in 1991. It introduced a generation of PC users to the core mechanic: guide a growing line, eat food, avoid crashing into yourself. But none of these versions reached a mainstream audience. They were hobbyist curiosities, known mainly to people who actively sought out computer games.

Armanto chose the snake concept precisely because it was proven and simple. The full history of the snake game genre spans decades, but the core idea (a line that grows and must avoid itself) was already 20 years old by 1997. It mapped perfectly to the Nokia 6110's constraints: four-directional movement, a tiny grid, and gameplay that could be understood without instructions.

What Made This Version Different From Everything Before It

Previous snake games were played by people who chose to seek them out. Armanto's version was played by people who happened to own a Nokia phone. That distinction changed everything.

Snake shipped pre-installed on every Nokia 6110 sold anywhere in the world. There was no App Store, no mobile internet worth mentioning, and no way to install additional software on the phone. The game was simply there, accessible from the phone's menu, with zero friction between buying the phone and playing your first game. For millions of people, it was the first video game they ever played.

The game also fit the way people actually used their phones. A session lasted one to three minutes, perfect for bus stops, waiting rooms, and lunch breaks. The controls used keys that were already on the device. Battery impact was negligible. And the core loop was deeply satisfying: easy to learn, hard to master, and quick enough to restart that one more game always felt within reach.

Nokia recognized the game's appeal and began shipping it on virtually every phone they manufactured. By the early 2000s, Nokia held over 30 percent of the global mobile phone market. Snake was on every single device.

400 Million Phones and Counting

Between 1997 and 2007, Nokia shipped over 400 million phones with some version of Snake pre-installed. Industry analysts estimate that at least 350 million unique people played the game during that decade. At its peak in the early 2000s, more people were playing Snake on a daily basis than any other video game on the planet.

The game evolved as Nokia's hardware improved. Snake II launched on the Nokia 3310 in 2000, one of the best-selling phones of all time with over 126 million units sold. Snake II added screen-wrapping (the snake could pass through one edge and appear on the opposite side), obstacles at higher levels, and bonus food items. Snake III (sometimes called Snake Xenzia) brought color graphics to Nokia's Symbian smartphones. Through every version, the core gameplay that Armanto designed remained intact: four directions, a growing tail, and the challenge of not crashing into yourself.

When HMD Global relaunched the Nokia brand in 2017, they included an updated Snake on the Nokia 3310 reboot. In 2019, Nokia partnered with Facebook to release a multiplayer version on Messenger. The game kept finding new audiences, decades after Armanto wrote the original code.

What Armanto Has Said About Creating Snake

Taneli Armanto has given a handful of interviews over the years, mostly to Finnish media and technology publications. His comments are consistently understated. He has described Snake as a straightforward project that took a relatively short time to develop, noting that the game's simplicity was its greatest asset.

In interviews, Armanto has emphasized that the game's success was largely a function of distribution. Nokia was selling millions of phones per year, and Snake was on all of them. He has credited the constraints of the Nokia 6110 (the tiny screen, the simple keypad, the two-tone display) with forcing a design that was clean and focused. There was no room for complexity, which turned out to be the point.

Armanto has also spoken about being surprised by the game's cultural longevity. He expected it to be a minor feature that shipped with the phone and was quickly forgotten. Instead, it became one of the defining experiences of early mobile technology, a shared reference point for an entire generation of phone users.

Where Snake Fits in the History of Mobile Gaming

Snake proved that a mobile phone could be a gaming platform, not just a communication tool. That sounds obvious now, but in 1997 it was not. Phones were for calls and text messages. The idea that people would spend significant time playing games on their phone was not taken seriously by most of the industry.

Snake's success directly influenced the development of Java ME (J2ME) mobile gaming, which made downloadable games possible on later handsets. Without Snake demonstrating that there was a massive market for games on phones, the path to smartphone app stores might have looked very different. The through-line from Snake (1997) to the App Store (2008) to today's $200 billion mobile gaming industry runs through the decision to put a simple game on a business phone.

For millions of people around the world, Snake was their first video game. Not on a console, not on a PC, but on the phone in their pocket. Taneli Armanto did not set out to create a cultural touchstone. He was given a brief, worked within tight constraints, and built something that happened to be exactly right for the moment. The result was a game that more people played than any console title of its era, and one that people still seek out nearly 30 years later.