Year Of The Snake Special: A Brief History Of The ‘Snake’ Mobile Game

Image via Nokia

From formidable snake bosses in action-RPGs like Black Myth: Wukong and Elden Ring, to friendly companions such as Baizhu’s pet snake Changsheng in Genshin Impact, snakes have become a common sight in games of all kinds. But arguably the most famous videogame snake of all time comes from a game that’s so simple it could be played on a calculator.

That’s right – today, we’re celebrating the humble Snake, a staple of 90’s mobile phones that’s continued to endure to this day!

The First Snake Game… Wasn’t Actually About Snakes

Snake has its origins in arcade games of the 1970s, being heavily inspired by Blockade from American arcade game developer Gremlin Industries. Blockade was a two-player game where players controlled an arrow, which left a trail of blocks behind it whenever it moved. If a player crashed into the wall or their opponent’s trail, a point would be awarded to the opponent.

As Blockade grew in popularity, it began to inspire a number of clones for various devices, which included Worm for the TRS-80, one of the earliest home computers; Snake Byte for the Atari 8-bit; and Snake for the BBC Micro. The game concept eventually made its way onto mobile phones in 1998, when programmer Taneli Armanto designed Snake for the Nokia 6110.

Image via MoMA

Snake was likely selected due to its simple concept, which could be universally understood without any explanation: you control a snake, moving it around the screen to eat food that randomly pops up. The snake gets longer with each piece of food it eats, making it more difficult for the player to control as they must also avoid crashing into walls or obstacles.

The game also perfectly fit into the extremely limited system requirements of the Nokia 6110, whose operating system could only hold one megabyte of memory, and a display of no more than 48 x 84 black and white pixels.

Snake In The Modern Era

From there, the rest is history. Nokia embedded Snake onto nearly 350 million phones worldwide, and continued to release Snake for subsequent models of Nokia phones, all the way to the Nokia 5310 from March 2020. Due to its simple yet addictive structure, it has inspired many imitators over the years, including the previously mentioned calculator version of the game.

Of course, you don’t need to go to the effort of programming Snake onto your calculator if you’d like to try out the game. You can play dozens of Snake-inspired games online, many of which have added modern twists such as playing the game in 3D, or even turning the game into a top-down shooter. If you’d prefer to stick to the classics, though, it’s also available in your browser via Google.

Images via Cool Math Games, Steam, TikTok

Snake has also made it back onto modern mobile phones in a very different form than what the programmers at Nokia could have imagined back in the 90’s. Aside from mobile gaming apps, there are now also numerous TikTok game filters inspired by the Snake game structure, with all kinds of variations added such as more snakes, more food types and more obstacles.


We hope you found this article interesting! If you need a quick game to pass the time between open houses this Lunar New Year, Snake or one of its many variations might just work for you.

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