Nokia Snake: The Complete Story of the Game That Lived in Every Pocket

Think back for a second. The phone is warm in your hand. The screen glows a soft, sickly green, the kind of green that only existed between 1997 and about 2003. Your thumb is resting on the 2 key. There's a single black dot somewhere on the screen, blinking, and a line of little squares is crawling toward it.

You are not on a bus. You are not in a maths class. You are not waiting outside your mum's office. You are inside that screen, and nothing else matters until the snake bites its own tail.

That was Nokia Snake. For millions of us it was the first video game we ever carried around. It never needed charging on its own, never needed a cartridge, and never asked for a password. It was just there, under Menu, then Games, then Snake.

This guide is the hub for everything we've written about it. Start here, then follow whichever trail pulls at you.

What was Nokia Snake?

Snake is a simple idea. You steer a line around a box. Each time you eat a dot, the line gets longer. Hit a wall, or hit yourself, and it's over. That's it. The whole game fits in one sentence, and that's exactly why it worked.

Nokia's version was written by Taneli Armanto, a Nokia engineer, and first shipped on the Nokia 6110, which was announced in late 1997. It wasn't the first snake game in history — the idea goes back to arcade machines in the 1970s — but it was the first one that went everywhere you went. We tell that origin story properly in how Snake landed on the Nokia 6110.

The phones that made it famous

The 6110 started it. The 5110 spread it. Then the Nokia 3310 arrived in 2000 with Snake II, and suddenly every school playground had a high-score war going on.

Each phone changed the game a little. Some had walls, some let you wrap around the edges, and Snake II added mazes and little bonus creatures worth extra points. If you've ever argued with a friend about which version was "the real one", our Nokia 3310 Snake II deep dive settles it, and our list of Nokia phones that had Snake will tell you which one was in your pocket.

How to play

The controls were the phone's number keys:

• 2 turns up
• 4 turns left
• 6 turns right
• 8 turns down

You never stop moving. You only choose where to turn. Before you start you pick a level from 1 to 9, and the higher the level, the faster the snake moves and the more each dot is worth. The full rules, including how scoring works, are in how to play Nokia Snake.

Getting a big score

Anyone can eat ten dots. The game really starts when your snake is so long it fills half the screen, and every turn could trap you. The players with the scary scores all used the same few tricks: hug the walls, sweep the board in rows, and never chase a dot across open space. We break all of it down in Snake high score tips.

Where the idea came from

Long before Nokia, there was an arcade game called Blockade in 1976, then home-computer versions, then Nibbles on old PCs. After Nokia came Snake on smartphones, and now there's even a version inside Google search. The whole family tree is in the history of the snake game, from Blockade to Google.

Why we still love it

Maybe it's because Snake was there for the boring bits of life. The dentist's waiting room. The long drive to your grandparents. The last ten minutes before the school bell. It turned dead time into something that felt like yours. We wrote about that feeling in why we still love Nokia Snake.

Play it again, right now

You don't need to dig your old phone out of a drawer and hunt for a charger. Our Snake is rebuilt to feel exactly like the monochrome Nokia version: the same blocky snake, the same deadly walls, nine speed levels and on-screen keypad buttons that work on your phone.

Pick level 1 if you want to remember. Pick level 9 if you want to feel 14 again, heart pounding, thumb aching, one more go.