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.
Use the arrow keys to steer your snake around the board, eating food to grow longer. Avoid hitting the walls or your own tail.
Each piece of food eaten adds 10 points to your score. Longer survival means a longer snake means a higher score.
If your manager recognises this from their old Nokia, you've already won the conversation before it starts.
No — hitting a wall ends the run, just like the original.
Yes, with on-screen swipe controls, though keyboard arrows on desktop feel truer to the original.
The arrow keys or WASD.
A bonus item that appears every 60 seconds. Eating it doubles your points for 10 seconds.
Yes, it speeds up as it grows, so plan your route a couple of moves ahead.
Snake
Collect research items — books, coffee, reports, flasks. Arrow keys or WASD to steer. Hit a wall or yourself and the field study ends.