The original tab-switching game, decades before tab-switching games were a category. Eat, grow, try not to eat yourself.

Snake traces back to a 1976 arcade game called Blockade, but it didn't become a global obsession until 1997, when Nokia engineer Taneli Armanto built it into the Nokia 6110 as one of three pre-installed games. Within a decade, Nokia had shipped it on over 400 million phones, making it one of the most-played video games in history at a time when there was no app store and nothing else to download — it was just there, two taps away, every time you were bored. Part of what made it stick is how perfectly the loop is tuned: sessions take one to three minutes, the rules are instantly legible, and the difficulty curve (the snake speeds up as it grows) means every run gets harder right up until the moment you lose. That's the same psychology still doing the work here — easy to start, impossible to walk away from after a bad run, and the next attempt is always one tap away.