I'm Taneli.
I created
Snake.

My Milestones

1. Before 1997 / Early career

   An engineer, not a game studio

   I trained and worked as an engineer in Finland's telecommunications industry. Snake did not come out of a games company: it came out of my handset development work, where every kilobyte of memory and every pixel of a monochrome display had to be justified.

2. 1990s / Nokia

   Inside Nokia Mobile Phones

   I worked at Nokia during the years the company became the world's dominant handset maker. The software we shipped on those phones was tiny by modern standards — built to run in a few kilobytes of RAM on a display of roughly 84x48 pixels.

3. 1997 / Creation of Snake

   Snake ships on the Nokia 6110

   I designed and programmed the version of Snake that shipped preinstalled on the Nokia 6110. The concept traces back to 1970s arcade games such as Blockade, but this implementation — one-thumb control, instant restart, a single high score — is the one hundreds of millions of people actually played.

   It had to be simple enough for the hardware, and immediate enough to play while you waited for a bus.

4. 1998 – 2005 / Worldwide success

   Preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones

   As Snake shipped across the Nokia range — the 3210, 3310, 8210 and beyond — it became, by distribution, one of the most widely available video games ever made. For a whole generation it was the first game they ever played on a phone, and I am still asked about it every week.

5. 2015 / Snake Rewind

   The original designer returns to Snake

   I returned to Snake with Snake Rewind, released for modern smartphones and published by Rumilus Design. We reworked the original idea for touchscreens while keeping the escalating-tension loop that made the 1997 version compulsive.

6. Today / OGSnake.world

   A modern Snake project on the web

   OGSnake.world is the contemporary, browser-based Snake project I feature here as a modern continuation of the lineage. I keep any claim about the people or companies involved limited to what its official channels state publicly.