The History of Snake
Snake is one of those rare ideas that needed almost nothing to work. It has no story and no characters, and it can run on nearly any screen. All it asks is one question: how long can you keep going before your own success gets in the way?
It began as a duel
The idea goes back to Blockade, an arcade game Gremlin Industries released in 1976. It was nothing like the quiet game people remember now. Two players each steered a moving line around the screen, leaving a trail behind them, and whoever crashed last won. It was a fight over space.
That is the part that never went away. Long before there was an apple to chase, the real opponent was the shrinking room you had left.
Then it came home
Home computers gave the idea room to change. Worm appeared on the TRS-80 in 1978, and new versions kept turning up through the 1980s, including Snake on the BBC Micro and the Nibbler arcade game, both in 1982. By 1991, Nibbles was shipping as a sample program with MS-DOS, so plenty of people first met it by opening a piece of code.
Somewhere along the way the game became a solo one. That changed how it feels. With no one to beat, you are only playing against yourself, and the longer you survive, the more of the danger is you. That is the best idea in the whole game.
The phone in everyone's pocket
Then came the moment that made it famous. Around 1997 to 1998, Nokia's 6110 phone came with a version of Snake programmed by Taneli Armanto. A small black and white screen and a number pad suited it perfectly: it was simple to see, quick to start, and easy to stop when your bus arrived.
For many people, it was the first game they ever carried around with them. When the Nokia 3310 arrived in 2000 with Snake II, the game was already part of daily life, played in queues and classrooms and under desks. Nobody had to download it or even decide to get it. It was simply there.
Why it never left
Plenty of games from that time are now only remembered. Snake is still being played. Google has put it in a Doodle and even, as an April Fools' joke in 2019, inside Google Maps. Slither.io took it online in 2016 and filled the board with other players, which in a way brought it back to the duel it started as.
It lasts because it is fair. There are no hidden rules and no bad luck to blame. When the run ends, you can see exactly which turn did it, and you are sure you could do better next time. That thought has kept people pressing start for fifty years.
Our version
We built Just Play Snake to feel like that phone in your pocket: blocky pixels and simple sounds. Classic keeps the walls that make every turn count. Y2K opens them up, in a nod to the years around 2000 when so many of us first played. You open the page and you just play.