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Armanto

Interviews10 June 20255 min read

Snake Rewind: My Return, Eighteen Years Later

In 2015 I revisited Snake for touchscreens as the designer of the Nokia original — and had to solve a problem that did not exist in 1997.

Snake Rewind, published by Rumilus Design in 2015 with my involvement, is the rare sequel made by the person who wrote the original.

The touchscreen problem

A keypad gave four discrete, tactile directions. A glass panel gives none. Reconstructing the precision of the original input was the central design task.

The rewind mechanic

The game's title feature — resuming from a death rather than restarting cold — is a concession to a modern audience whose patience for a hard reset is shorter than a 1997 commuter's.

What it preserved

The escalating self-collision pressure survived intact, which is the only part I could not change without making a different game.

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.

Frequently asked

Who made Snake Rewind?
It was published by Rumilus Design in 2015 with my involvement — I designed the original Nokia Snake.
What is the rewind mechanic?
It lets a player resume a run from the point of death rather than starting a new game from zero.