Snake is one of the most democratic pieces of art of the late twentieth century. It arrived without a target audience: no demographic, no skill barrier, no language requirement, no manual. A grandmother in Helsinki, a taxi driver in Lagos, a teenager in São Paulo and a banker in London were handed the same small black-and-white composition and asked to do the same simple thing. Before Snake, gaming was a destination, and a destination implied a gatekeeper: an arcade, a console, a television to negotiate for. Snake collapsed that geography, and with it the hierarchies that had governed who got to play.
What followed was genuinely new: digital art that travelled freely across generations. Parents handed phones to children who learned the rules in seconds; children taught their grandparents. It asked nothing of you beyond presence and returned the same experience to everyone, a quality more often found in a physical artwork than in software. Aesthetically it is a masterclass in constraint: a pixelated worm, a dot of food, a rectangular arena, no music or colour, just the snake growing longer and faster until you betrayed yourself. The work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
By the early 2000s Snake had shipped on roughly 400 million handsets and played by over one billion people, a print run no painting or sculpture has matched, and became the foundation for Candy Crush, Flappy Bird, Wordle and the entire $100-billion mobile gaming industry. For an entire generation it was the first piece of digital art they ever held and that primal-encounter status, shared across continents, classes and ages at almost the same moment in history, gives it weight far disproportionate to its technical sophistication.
Taneli Armanto is a Finnish software engineer, born in 1965 in Finland, who is best known as the creator of Snake, the game preloaded on the Nokia 6110 in 1997 that became the most-played mobile game of its era. He grew up without home computers, filling the gap with board games (still a hobby of his), and first encountered programming as a teenager when his school acquired a single computer and started a small IT group.
He went on to study mathematics and computer science, and in 1995 joined Nokia, where he had a bit of a gaming background, and so he was tasked with developing “some cool little games” on the upcoming Nokia 6110 mobile phone. His first attempt was actually a port of Tetris, but Nokia balked at the licensing terms; he pivoted to a snake-style concept inspired by a two-player game he’d played with a friend on a Macintosh, designed to fit the 6110’s tiny monochrome screen and minimal memory.