Snake Gozo revives a concept most people associate with an old Nokia phone. In reality, this game is much older than that — its history begins nearly 20 years before a Finnish engineer first programmed it for mobile.

1976: Blockade, the forgotten ancestor

The concept of a trail that grows and must be avoided first appeared in 1976, in an arcade game called Blockade, developed by Gremlin Industries. Unlike the Snake we know today, Blockade was a two-player game: each player controlled a line growing behind them, and had to avoid hitting their own trail, the opponent's, or the screen edges.

Blockade's success was immediate, quickly spawning clones on early arcade cabinets and then on emerging home computers, notably the TRS-80 and Apple II in the following years.

1997: arrival on the Nokia 6110

It took over twenty years for the concept to become a global phenomenon. In 1997, Finnish engineer Taneli Armanto programmed a version of Snake for the Nokia 6110, one of the very first mass-market mobile phones with a preinstalled game. This extremely simplified version — a pixel snake, an apple to eat, four directions — quickly became one of the most-played games in history, carried by Nokia's massive commercial success at the time.

Why this concept aged so well

What makes Snake interesting is its radical simplicity: a single rule (don't touch yourself), a difficulty that naturally increases as the snake grows, and controls that fit on four keys. This formula proved so robust that it survived arcade cabinets, keypad phones, then touchscreen smartphones, all the way to the HTML5 version you can try here.