Following the news that Microsoft has bought Nokia for €5.4 billion, Newstalk remembers one of the best things about the Finnish mobile phone company: Snake, the inimitable video game we played (and watched our friends playing) during school lunch breaks all those years ago.
It existed long before your old Nokia 3210 ever did
Nokia didn't invent Snake. It's actually based on a 1976 maze game called Blockade, where the player moves their character around using four directional buttons, leaving a solid line behind them a la Snake.
The first home computer version of Snake was called Worm
It looked pretty complicated.
The control system was first used on a version for the BBC Microcomputer System
Just like on the Nokia 3210, here you moved the snake using only left or right arrows depending on whatever direction the snake was heading in. It's infinitely confusing at first, but when you spend every school day playing the game underneath your desk you're bound to get the hang of it eventually.
Bonus: Yep, the BBC once tried its hand at selling computers for a computer literacy project in the early 1980s. They looked like this and cost £235:
There have been seven sequels to Snake since the original version on the first Nokias
Noteworthy versions include Snake II on the 3310, which came with mazes, a 3D version called Snakes for the horrific failure that was the N-Gage (that weird gameboy look-a-like you never, ever saw anyone actually using) and Snakes Subsonic, released in 2008 for the second generation N-Gage (surprise surprise, that was also a flop).
You can play Snake on YouTube
Or at least you could. For a while, you could play Snake on YouTube while waiting for your video to buffer. All you had to do was pause the video and press the left and up arrows at the same time. The capability was first introduced in 2010, but we couldn't get it to work ourselves.
Images: © Uvlist.net, Wikipedia/Commons, Wikipedia/Commons, Mobzgames, Wikipedia/Commons
