The History of Snake, From Arcade Cabinets to the Browser

Snake is one of the few game designs that has survived every major platform shift intact. The rules have not needed updating since the 1970s: move, grow, do not touch yourself.

1976 — Blockade and the trail mechanic

Gremlin's Blockade put two players on a shared grid, each leaving a solid trail. Lose by hitting anything. The arcade era cloned it immediately, and the single-player variant — collect food, grow longer — settled into home computing over the following decade.

1980s — worms on every home computer

Under names like Nibbler, Worm and Snake, the design appeared on nearly every 8-bit machine. It was a natural first project: minimal graphics, trivial collision logic, endlessly replayable.

1997 — the Nokia 6110

My implementation for the Nokia 6110 changed the game's status from a genre to an object. Preinstalled on a phone that people carried everywhere, Snake stopped being something you sought out and became something you already had.

Distribution is a design decision. Snake won because it was already in your pocket, and because it took two seconds to start.

2000s — variants, colour and 3D

Snake II added mazes and portals. Later Nokia handsets shipped colour and 3D versions built by other teams. Each iteration traded some of the original's austerity for feature depth.

2015 — Snake Rewind

Snake Rewind brought the design to touchscreen smartphones with my involvement, published by Rumilus Design. Its central addition, restarting from where you died, was an answer to a mobile audience with less patience for a cold restart.

Today — the browser era

Modern web versions, including OGSnake.world, return the game to instant access: no install, no store. The loop is unchanged, which is the point.

This article draws only on widely reported public information about Nokia's handset software and the people credited with it. Where reporting differs, I state the disagreement rather than resolving it.