Snake

Nokia 6110 Snake: How a Tiny Game Ended Up in Millions of Pockets

By TropicGames · 16 October 2026 · 2 min read

Dark blue Nokia 6110 with Snake on its screen

Picture a phone in 1997. It's thick. It has a stubby antenna. It makes calls and sends the odd text, and that's about it. Then somebody at Nokia decides it should also be fun.

That phone was the Nokia 6110, and the somebody was an engineer named Taneli Armanto.

A small screen, a big idea

The 6110 had a tiny monochrome screen made of chunky pixels. There was no colour and no sound worth talking about. Whatever game went on it had to be simple enough to understand in one glance and play with one thumb.

Snake was perfect. The idea already existed in arcades and on home computers, but nobody had put it in a phone that people carried all day. Armanto built a version that fit the 6110's screen and keypad, and it shipped alongside a couple of other small games.

Two players, one beam of light

Here's the bit a lot of people forget. On the 6110 you could play Snake against a friend using the phone's infrared port. You'd sit across a table, point your phones at each other like a pair of TV remotes, and race.

It was clunky. It dropped out if someone moved. And it was magic. For a lot of us, that was the first time a phone felt like a toy and not a tool.

Why it mattered

Before Snake, a phone was something your dad used for work. After Snake, it was something you begged to borrow. People played in queues, in waiting rooms, under desks. Nokia had stumbled onto the idea that would shape every phone after it: people don't just want to call each other. They want something to do.

The phones that followed

The 6110 was the start. The game spread through the 5110, the 3210 and then exploded with Snake II, which first appeared on the Nokia 7110 in 1998 and reached millions more on the Nokia 3310 in 2000. You can see how each one changed the game in our Nokia 3310 Snake II deep dive and our list of Nokia phones with Snake.