Adarsh looks back at the first game to appear on a mobile device!
The year was 2000. You were at the bus stop. Or in the supermarket with your mother. Or at your dad’s office waiting for him to get done with work.
If you didn’t have your own Nokia handset yet, you would borrow your parent’s. You would click on Menu and go to Games and select Snake. And then you’d play the game for hours on end.
I am sure anyone who’s ever held a Nokia phone would’ve played the game at least once. And if you’ve played it once, chances are that you would’ve played it again. You have to admit the game was addictive!
So how did it all begin? How did such a simple game become such a rage all around the globe? Let’s take a walk down memory lane.
Snake’s Phone Debut
The game was first introduced on a mobile handset when Nokia launched the 6610 in 1997.
It was a simple game that was easy enough to learn but difficult enough to keep you hooked and try to beat the high score. The player controls a dot or a square that would be moving on a bordered screen. The player could move the dot up, down, left or right to avoid the borders while eating new dots that appear randomly on the screen. With each new dot that the snake ate, the player’s points would increase as would the size of the snake. The player loses when the snake runs into the screen border, some other obstacle or itself.
At a time when mobiles were still gaining popularity around the world, the game became a global phenomenon. Nokia, at its peak in 1997, was the biggest mobile phone company with a 51% global market share. At that point, Apple had only 25%.
The Mastermind behind Snake
In 2005, Taneli Armanto, a software engineer in Finland, applied to Nokia. Since he already had some game developing experience, he was tasked with coming up with ‘some cool little games’ for upcoming Nokia handsets.
Others on the team were coding versions of calculators and calendars for the new devices and Armanto considered the game to be just one more such feature.
But he recalls having a lot of fun developing the game. Talking to Mel Magazine, Armanto said: “In 1995, Nokia was growing fast. We were all pretty new. It was exciting! We were developing new things into the handsets and we got to carry around the newest devices, because naturally, they needed proper testing. So, I was tasked with putting the games on the phone, which I was happy with, because I liked games. Board games especially.”
He first considered Tetris which was a popular game at that time but there were copyright issues which is when he turned his attention to developing Snake.
How the Game Works
Snake was coded in programming language C, like most other parts of the software in the handsets of the ’90s. The game was hand-written line-by-line as there were no code generators back then.
During the testing phase to work out the best way to move the snake on the display, Taneli noticed that it was difficult to go towards the edge of the screen and make a 90-degree turn without crashing. To avoid players from getting frustrated and discontinuing because of this, he added a tiny delay to the crash so that players had a few more milliseconds to react and save the snake. “So it’s easier now to continue playing even with the faster speed; I don’t know if this has had any consequences but I’d like to think so,” said Taneli.
The Original Arcade Version
The idea behind the game was first developed as a concept in 1976 by a gaming company called Gremlin Interactive. The game was called Blockade and was a two-player arcade game. To win, the player had to last the longest without hitting anything else.
It inspired other reboots, like Bigfoot Bonkers in 1977 as well as Atari’s computer-based version called Worm in 1978 followed by the single player arcade game called Nibbler in 1982.
But none of these versions became as popular or prominent as Taneli’s Nokia version from 1997.
A 100 Billion Dollar Industry
Snake was a milestone moment for the mobile gaming industry. Since its appearance, there have been over 420 Snake-like games on iOS alone. It paved the way for other more complicated games to be developed and launched on mobiles and as of today, the mobile gaming industry is worth over $100 billion. And all of that began with a tiny little snake moving around the small black and white Nokia phone screens.
If you’re getting nostalgic about your favorite mobile game from the ’90s and 2000s, well you’re in luck! There has been a retro trend in recent years that has seen a lot of classics from the ’90s make a comeback.
In 2020, Nokia relaunched an upgraded version of the Nokia 3310 and the Nokia 5310 and also launched the Nokia 2720 Flip. A reworked, enhanced version of Snake is available on all three models. Obviously!
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