This year, apparently, is the Chinese Year of the Snake. You probably knew that, but to be honest, this isn’t something I keep track of – or have any particular interest in. All I know is a Chinese lady that I once knew gleefully told me I was a "rat". I assumed she meant it based on my birth year, but thinking back… maybe not.

Anyway, this preamble segues nicely into the topic of this blog: the retro-mobile phone game SNAKE – because forget Young-hee and her laser eyes, in my opinion this game was actually more ruthless and frustrating than Squid Game!
 

📱 The Birth of a Mobile Gaming Icon

Way, way back in prehistory – approximately 1997 – Finnish software engineer Taneli Armanto developed Snake for Nokia’s revolutionary new 6110 mobile phone.

“Why was it so revolutionary?” you ask. Well… hold onto your hats Gen-Z’ers – this groundbreaking Nokia featured a 6-day battery, a calendar and… wait for it… a calculator!!

Admittedly, it only sported a basic greyish-green monochrome LCD screen (designers: approx. #92c08f for reference), but it was on this tiny 84 × 48 pixel display (today’s can be as high as 3840 × 2160 px) that Snake first slithered its way into mobile gaming history!

The Nokia 6110 had two massive claims to fame:

1️⃣  First mobile phone with a pre-installed game (Snake), making mobile gaming mainstream.

2️⃣  First phone to use Infrared (IR) connectivity for multiplayer gaming, allowing two players to compete wirelessly over a ~30 cm distance

These were huge firsts for mobile gaming, laying the groundwork for wireless multiplayer and the future of mobile gaming culture.

🐍  How to Play Snake: A simple yet insanely addictive game

🎮  You control a pixelated snake, guiding it around the screen.

🥅  The goal? Eat randomly appearing food pellets to increase your score and as a consequence grow longer.

💥  The challenge? DON’T crash into yourself or the screen edges! (Note: The OG version didn’t let you wrap around, that came later.)

🎛  The controls? 90-degree turns only, using the keypad (⬆️2️⃣, ⬅️4️⃣, ➡️6️⃣, ⬇️8️⃣)

Sounds easy? Trust me, it wasn’t. As the snake grew longer, moving around became increasingly difficult, requiring faster reflexes as the game sped up. You also required a brutal amount of self-restraint to not go for later pellets if it endangered your game.

🚀  Snake's Legacy: How It Changed Mobile Gaming Forever

For something so visually simple, Snake introduced several key innovations that  shaped mobile gaming world:

✅  High Scores: The first mobile game with a dedicated high-score system – because bragging rights matter!

✅  Progressive Difficulty: The more you ate, the more your snake grew, making the game progressively harder… a LOT harder!

✅  Multiplayer mode: Thanks to the Nokia 6110’s infrared (IR) connectivity, two players could compete wirelessly – an early glimpse into the future of online gaming.

For a generation, Snake wasn’t just a game – it was their first mobile gaming addiction!

🎮 Ready to Revive the Snake in You?

So that’s the story of the legendary Snake. When we re-imagined our website design at chukster.com we asked our developers to code this slithery, pixelly little game into this site as priority number-1. As you can see, the rest of the websites design – including our various other pixellated characters – follow Snakes lead!

So… feeling nostalgic? Itching to play ‘the legend’ one more time (spoiler: it’s impossible to play only once!)

We got you covered!
👉 Play Snake Now! Just head to our About Us page.
Have fun! (hehe you won’t!) 🐍🐍🐍🐍