Remember Snake? It was a game that started its life as a preload on the Nokia 6110 back in 1997. Before the highly successful, ultra-competitive mobile gaming space came into fruition, millions of cellphone users the world over were playing Snake. It was for monochrome cellphones. The graphics were black squares and you could move only in four directions. Taneli Armanto was the design engineer at Nokia responsible for it.
Prior to this, the game has been available on home computers since the late 70s. But Armanto’s version of the Snake game made a big impact when it was released on Nokia 6110 in the late 1997. Since then, it was featured in over 400 million Nokia phones and is one of the most popular games in history.
Fast forward to almost a lifetime later and Armanto is back. Partnering with Rumilus Design, an independent game studio based in Turku, Finland. Its previous games include Collapsticks and Finger Zapper.
Snake Rewind remixes the well known elements and familiar gameplay of the original with modern day trappings in terms of production values. Much like most mobile games nowadays, Snake Rewind is free-to-play with microtransactions. Some new features include being able to rewind the snake after crashing to continue, new fruit types, a fruit store and leaderboards.
And in a surprising twist, the game will be available on Android, Windows Phone, and iOS on the same day. Something that does not usually happen. However now there are numerous clones of the concept and mobile gaming has evolved into a completely different beast. Will people still be interested? We’ll probably know when the game hits on May 14.
