Snake: The Tiny Nokia Game That Hundreds of Millions Played First

Ask anyone who owned a mobile phone around the year 2000 what their first phone game was, and there is a good chance the answer will be the same. A line of black pixels, a single dot of food, and a snake that grew longer every time it ate, until it inevitably crashed into its own tail.

That was Snake, created by Nokia engineer Taneli Armanto and preloaded on the Nokia 6110, which went on sale in 1998. Nokia estimates that about 350 million copies of the game exist in one form or another, which makes it one of the most widely distributed games ever made. It never had a price tag, a download button or an app store. It simply came with the phone.

A game that wasn't supposed to be Snake

Armanto had joined Nokia in the mid-1990s as a software engineer, working on the phones' user interface. When the company wanted games for its new models, his first idea was a falling-block puzzle in the style of Tetris. That ran into rights problems, so he looked for a design that nobody owned.

He found it in an old arcade concept. The idea of a line that grows as it moves and must avoid its own body goes back to Blockade, a 1976 arcade game from Gremlin, and to home computer games such as Snake Byte in 1982. Armanto's version was built for a tiny monochrome screen and a number pad: keys 2, 4, 6 and 8 steered the snake up, left, right and down.

Simple rules, endless tension

Snake is almost impossible to explain badly. You steer, you eat, you grow, and you must not hit yourself or the wall. The difficulty comes entirely from your own success: the better you play, the longer your snake and the less room you have left.

That design suited the phone perfectly. Games lasted minutes, they could be played with one thumb, and they needed no instructions. On a bus, in a queue or under a school desk, it filled spare time in a way nothing else on a phone could.

Armanto had also planned a two-player mode over infrared, using the 6110's infrared port, but it could not be tested before release because the prototype phones he worked with lacked the infrared link.

The snake keeps growing

Snake became a fixture of Nokia phones for the next decade, and each generation got its own version, mostly built by larger teams without Armanto:

• Snake II appeared on phones such as the Nokia 7110.
• Snake EX and Snake EX2 came in 2002 and 2003.
• Snake III (2005) moved to colour and 3D-style graphics on Series 40 phones, while Snake Xenzia kept the classic form alive on budget Nokia handsets.
• Snakes (2005) brought it to Nokia's gaming phone, the N-Gage, followed by Snakes Subsonic in 2007.

When HMD revived the Nokia 3310 in 2017, a new Snake, developed by Gameloft, came preinstalled, a nostalgic nod that got almost as much attention as the phone itself. Armanto himself returned to the idea in the mid-2010s with Snake Rewind, a spiritual successor made with the studio Rumilus Design.

Why it matters

Snake is the reason "mobile gaming" meant something to hundreds of millions of people long before smartphones. It showed that a phone game didn't need colour, a large screen or a story; it needed a clear idea that fitted a pocket and a few spare minutes. Every quick-session mobile hit since, from Fruit Ninja to Flappy Bird, follows a path that Snake drew pixel by pixel.

It also helped make Finland a mobile gaming powerhouse. The country that gave the world Snake later gave it Angry Birds and Clash of Clans, and many of those developers grew up playing Snake on a Nokia.

Where to play it today

There is no official Nokia Snake on today's app stores. You can play a version by searching for "play snake" on Google, and the snake idea lives on in countless modern games. For the next chapter of Finland's mobile story, read our features on Angry Birds and Clash of Clans.