A game on a small screen
Many people who owned a mobile phone in the late 1990s and early 2000s remember playing Snake. The player steers a line, the snake, around the screen. Each piece of food eaten makes the line longer, and the game ends when the snake runs into a wall or into itself. It is simple to learn and becomes harder as the snake grows, which suited a monochrome screen of a few lines and a keypad with few buttons.
The game is often called the first smartphone app. That description needs some care. The phones on which Snake became famous were ordinary “feature phones,” not smartphones, and the game came already installed instead of being downloaded as an app. It is better to call it the best-known early mobile game, and one of the first games many people ever played on a phone.
Snake before the phone
The idea is older than mobile phones. A 1976 arcade game called Blockade, made by Gremlin, had players steering a growing line and trying not to hit walls or the trail. It was a two-player game. The same concept was copied and adapted by home computer programmers over the following years, often under names that included Snake, Worm or Nibbles. In the early 1990s, a version called Nibbles shipped with the QBasic programming environment that came with some versions of MS-DOS, which exposed it to a large number of computer users. The earliest history of such games is murky because many were written by hobbyists and shared informally.
This helps explain the later success. The game’s rules were familiar, and the design was easy to rebuild on almost any hardware, including limited early arcade cabinets and home computers, where memory and screen resolution were small.
Snake on Nokia phones
The version most people remember was installed on Nokia phones. It is generally credited to Taneli Armanto, a designer at Nokia, who created it for the Nokia 6110, which came out in 1997. It was installed on the phone, so owners had it from the first day without needing to buy or set up anything. The 6110 also had an infrared port, and Nokia added a two-player version that could be played between two phones.
Later models carried new versions, and the 2000 Nokia 3310, one of the best-selling phones of its time, included an updated Snake. Over time, the game appeared on a very large number of Nokia handsets. Figures in the hundreds of millions are often quoted for the number of phones that carried it, but these are rough and should be treated cautiously.
The game’s success is easy to understand. Phones then had small monochrome displays and simple processors. A game that used a grid, a few moving pixels and four directions fit within these limits. It could be played in a minute while waiting, and the scoring gave a reason to try again.
Other early phone games
Snake was not the first game on a phone. The Tetris puzzle game is commonly said to have appeared on a Hagenuk MT-2000 phone in 1994, an earlier example, though sources on this are thin. Other early phones had simple built-in games, and soon manufacturers and operators sold games for download using Java-based software and data services. These games were mostly small, with simple graphics, and were priced for impulse purchase.
Japan’s i-mode service from 1999 distributed games and other content to phones with data connections, and mobile gaming became large in Japan earlier than in many other places.
From preinstalled game to app store
What turned phone games into a large business was the app store model. When Apple opened its App Store in 2008 and Android followed, developers could publish games directly and users could install them in a few taps, with payment handled automatically. Touchscreens and accelerometers allowed new kinds of play. Games such as Angry Birds, released for iPhone in 2009, showed what a hit could look like, and free-to-play models, in which a game is free but offers purchases inside it, later became dominant.
Mobile gaming is now one of the largest segments of the video game industry by revenue, though the exact share and ranking change by year and source. The early video games of arcades and home computers influenced it, and Snake is one of the clearest links between them.
Why the label sticks
Calling Snake the first smartphone app has an appeal. It is a popular, easily remembered program on a pocket device. But it strains the definition of both words. The most accurate summary is that Snake was a very successful early game built into feature phones, drawing on a design older than the phone itself, and that it helped many people see their phone as something to play on, which prepared the ground for the app era.
Snake has returned in various forms since, including versions on modern phones and a reissued Nokia handset, which shows how much affection people have for it.