If you grew up in India in the 2000s, there's a good chance your first video game wasn't on a console. It was on a Nokia, with four tiny arrow keys and a green screen. You moved a line of pixels around, ate a dot, got longer, and eventually crashed into yourself. Then you played again. And again.
Here's the story of how that happened.
It started in an arcade, not a phone
The idea of a line that grows and must not hit anything is older than mobile phones. The first snake-style game is usually traced to Blockade, an arcade game from 1976. Two players each steered a growing trail and tried to make the other crash. Through the late 70s and 80s, lots of home computer versions followed, often just called "snake" or "worm".
Then Nokia put it in everyone's pocket
The version most of us remember was made by Taneli Armanto, a software engineer working on user interfaces at Nokia. His Snake shipped on the Nokia 6110 in the late 90s (sources say 1997 or 1998). It was one of the first games to come built into a phone.
The genius was how little it needed. No colour, no sound to speak of, just a few buttons. You could learn it in five seconds, and you could play it in a queue, on a bus, or under the desk in class.
The 6110 even had an infrared mode that let two phones play against each other, which felt like magic at the time.
How big did it get?
Very big. Nokia has said that around 350 million copies of Snake exist in some form, and Armanto himself has said the real number is probably higher. For a lot of people, it was the first game they ever played.
Nokia kept updating it: Snake II on the Nokia 7110, then Snake EX, Snake III, and Snake Xenzia on cheaper phones like the Nokia 1600. That last one is the one many Indian kids played on their parents' phones.
The comeback
In 2017 Nokia brought back the 3310, and of course Snake came with it, in a new version made by Gameloft. Nostalgia did the rest.
Why it still works
Snake is the perfect "one more round" game. The rules fit in one sentence. Every round is short. And every crash feels like your fault, so you want to try again right away. That's the same feeling every good casual game is still chasing.
Snake, but squishy
That's why I made Jelly Munch. It's the same snake you know: eat, grow, don't crash. But now it's a wobbly jelly, there are candy worlds, power-ups, and a new daily challenge every day. Same panic, more colour.