There were no delays at the hardest level, of course, and that buzzing sound that signalled ‘Game Over’ is one that many millennials, who acquired their first mobile phone when they joined college in the early 2000s, still recall with a rueful grin.Īlso read: Planet M - brand that changed how Indians experienced music in new millennium But there was also a science behind the levels of difficulty so as to not discourage a player.Īpparently, Finnish creator Taneli Armanto deliberately added a delay of “just a few milliseconds, right before the player crashes” to give them some extra time to change directions. It’s true that what made the game interesting was that as the snake became longer, its speed and the difficulty of manoeuvering it across the screen increased, and this was probably the key to the game’s addictive quality and reason why, at one point, it was embedded in about 350 million Nokia phones worldwide. It creates the ‘just one more game’ mentality that feeds into addiction.” “When things are simple, you feel like if you just fix a mistake or two, you build a longer snake. “If I had to think about it, why fight at all, especially over such a simple game? it’s just that,” he recalls. Vallabh Mamidipudi, a 27-year-old mobile game developer in Hyderabad, remembers how he and his cousins would fight for a turn on a single phone. You see it growing with each thing it eats and you can’t help but keep going.”
Snake just challenges the most primal part of you. I would play it on my mom’s old Nokia during car rides home from school. He says, “I remember playing Snake II when I was as young as four or five. Pranav Sunderesan, a 23-year-old philosophy graduate, tells ThePrint he’e been playing video games for the past 15 years. Draining a phone’s battery and earning the wrath of exasperated teachers was just collateral damage. In India and across the world, kids were hooked, eagerly competing for the highest score whether they were lying in bed, pretending to study in class or sitting at a café. The snake wasn’t just a line anymore, but had a proper form, there were bonuses and the screen was cyclical, allowing one to go through the bottom of the screen and come back out the top.
Snake II was launched with Nokia’s 3310 in 2000 and it became an entire generation’s obsession. However, it was actually the game’s second version that became a household name. It is considered to have signalled a new era in mobile gaming, an industry estimated to top $100 billion this year in revenues. It followed the basic idea of an elongating reptilian creature that moved faster as it consumed more dots (food) on the screen, but died if it collided into itself. But PUBG, Temple Run, Flappy Bird, Candy Crush and so many other popular games owe it all to one animated reptile slithering around on a two-inch screen.Īn addictively simple game, Snake was launched, in its mobile phone avatar, in 1997 with the Nokia 6110 - you remember, the blue candy bar-shaped model with a single antenna. With the evolution of graphics, internet access and phone storage, today’s mobile gaming industry offers you a whole arcade in the palm your hand.