The Snake Archives

The first Snake-type game was Blockade, an arcade cabinet from Gremlin Industries. Two players steered arrows that left a solid wall behind them; you lost by running into a wall, yours or theirs. It was cloned almost immediately — Atari’s Surround followed on the VCS in 1977.

The single-player version, the one where you eat something and get longer, arrives later. Peter Trefonas published Worm for the TRS-80 in CLOAD magazine in 1978, and by 1982 the food-eating form was everywhere: Snake Byte from Sirius Software, and Nibbler in the arcades.

This is the lineage Nokia itself points to. It is a better story than sole invention.

The Nokia 6110 was announced on 18 December 1997 and shipped the following year. It was the first Nokia phone with Snake on it, alongside two other games — Logic and Memory.

The job of putting games on it fell to Taneli Armanto, who was not a games developer. Nokia’s own retrospective gives his title exactly: a Design Engineer, User Interface Software.

His first choice was Tetris. It did not survive contact with the licence:

What was left was a monochrome strip a few dozen pixels across, a numeric keypad with no real directional control, and very little memory. Armanto described the brief as working backwards from those limits:

A note on that number, because it is repeated everywhere and deserves care. The documented 84 × 48 panel — driven by the Philips PCD8544, sold to this day as the “Nokia 5110 LCD” — belongs to the 5110, 3210 and 3310 family. For the 6110 specifically, no Nokia specification document gives a pixel count. The figure comes from Armanto himself, who described the screen as “48 x 84 black and white pixels” in a 2021 interview. Creator’s recollection, not a spec sheet.

Two details from Armanto’s interviews are worth more than any spec. The first is that the two-player mode came first, and was the point:

The second is a deliberate act of mercy hidden in the code. He gave the player a few milliseconds of grace at the walls, so a late turn could still save you:

On where the idea came from, the record is genuinely mixed. Armanto told MEL Magazine in 2019: “I had played a Snake-like game in my Apple Macintosh computer before.” Other accounts differ. He has never claimed to have invented it, and this page will not claim it for him.

Announced at CeBIT in Hannover on 12 April 1998. This is the handset whose display became the canonical 84 × 48 panel — the one that ended up in a generation of electronics projects long after the phone itself was gone.

Announced 1 September 2000. A 1.5-inch backlit monochrome LCD, 84 × 48 pixels, five lines of text, and four games: Snake II, Pairs II, Space Impact and Bantumi.

Snake II changed the one rule that mattered. The walls stopped killing you — the snake wraps to the opposite edge instead. It also brought five mazes, bonus items, more speed, and two-player over infrared. It first appeared on the Nokia 7110, announced 23 February 1999 and released that October, before reaching the 3310.

The famous 126-million-units figure comes from a Nokia press release dated 21 September 2005, and covers the 3310 and 3330 together rather than the 3310 alone.

Nokia estimated around 350 million phones carried Snake as of 2005, and said “over 400 million… now in its ninth version” in 2012. Both are the company’s own estimates, seven years apart, and neither is an audited number — but they are the right order of magnitude for what happened: a game that shipped as a rounding error in a phone’s bill of materials became one of the most-played things ever made.

In November 2012 the Museum of Modern Art announced Snake would join its video-game design collection. It is credited there as Taneli Armanto. Snake. 1997, and entered the collection on 19 October 2015.

It came back twice in one week in 2017. HMD Global unveiled a new Nokia 3310 at MWC Barcelona on 26 February with a Snake made by Gameloft — not the original. The next day, 27 February, HMD announced Snake for Facebook Messenger, built by CoolGames.

Every telephone keypad ever made carries the same letters, standardised as ITU-T Recommendation E.161: 2 is ABC, 3 is DEF, 4 is GHI, 5 is JKL, 6 is MNO, 7 is PQRS, 8 is TUV, 9 is WXYZ. (T9 is a separate predictive-text product built on top of that mapping, not the mapping itself.)

4-6-6-3 spells HOOD. Robinhood Chain’s chain ID is 4663.

There is no evidence anyone chose it for that reason, and this site does not suggest otherwise. It is a coincidence — a very good one. Try it on the keypad.

$SNAKE is the same game loop with a ledger attached. The Snake on this site is an original implementation on the same 28 × 16 grid the 84 × 48 panel implies, running a deterministic simulation that the server re-runs to verify every ranked score. The daily board pays its top ten from project fee revenue, and holding $SNAKE puts a wallet into the reward epochs.

None of which is the interesting part. The interesting part is that a game designed around not having enough memory, not having enough screen, and not having enough buttons is still the one people recognise instantly, thirty years later.

Constraint created the icon.