Nearly everyone meets Snake on a Nokia. By then it was twenty-one years old, had been through half a dozen names, and had started life as a two-player arcade cabinet with no snake in it and nothing to eat.
Blockade, from Gremlin, arrived in November 1976. Two players, one screen, each steering a marker that leaves a solid trail behind it. There is no food and nothing grows. You win by surviving one move longer than the other player, who is busy running out of room at the same rate you are.
The whole idea is already there in that first cabinet: the thing killing you is the space you have already used. Everything since has been a variation on it.
Atari, Ramtek and Meadows all shipped their own versions within a year, which cost Gremlin a good deal of its pre-order book. Atari's came to home consoles in 1977 as Surround, the first time the idea left the arcade. The first known personal-computer version, Worm, followed in 1978.
None of them called it Snake. That name arrived later and was applied backwards, once the shape of the thing became obvious.
The modern single-player version needs one more idea: something to collect, and a snake that grows when it does. Nibbler, from Rock-Ola, is usually given the credit, moving a lengthening snake through a maze after abstract objects.
That change is what turns a duel into a solo game, and it is a genuinely clever bit of design. Success is the only thing that makes the game harder. There is no difficulty setting, no rising enemy count, no timer. You are handed the rope and you decide how much of it to take.
Nokia's marketing team wanted something extra on the 6110, and Taneli Armanto, a design engineer there, wrote Snake for it. The constraints were severe: a small monochrome display with two usable tones, dark pixels on that greenish LCD.
The detail usually left out is that it was a two-player game. Armanto built it around the 6110's infrared link, which was new at the time, so two people could put their phones nose to nose and play against each other — closing the loop back to Blockade without, as far as anyone has said, intending to.
Nokia later put the number of handsets carrying Snake at around 350 million. Whatever the exact figure, it is the reason that a game designed for a 1976 arcade cabinet is something your parents can describe from memory.
Most games from 1976 are museum pieces. Snake is not, and the reason is that it has almost nothing in it. One input — turn — and one rule: do not touch anything, including yourself. It can be explained in a sentence to someone who has never played a video game, and it can still be lost in under ten seconds by someone who has played it for twenty years.
It is also one of the few games where every death is unambiguously yours. Nothing shoots at you. Nothing spawns behind you. The board is exactly as dangerous as you have made it, and you made all of it on purpose, one bite at a time.
Early arcade history is poorly documented and the sources disagree. Blockade's November 1976 release and Armanto's authorship of the Nokia version are well established; Nibbler being the first game where the snake grows on eating is contested rather than settled, and the Nokia version is dated 1997 or 1998 depending on whether you mean the handset or the software. Where accounts conflict we have said so rather than picking whichever is tidiest.
Snake League is the same game, and we have been careful not to pretend otherwise. One input, one rule, your own tail. What is new is everything around it: a weekly ladder with promotion and relegation, five modes that reward different things, and every ranked run replayed on the server before it reaches a leaderboard, so the number above yours was earned rather than typed.