Welcome to Old Games That Don’t Suck Thursday. Each week I’ll write about a game that somehow influenced by life as a game developer and which I can totally recommend to you because the game is flippin’ sweet. It also has to be old or at least forgotten about until recently.

One side of me says, “John, this graphic far too small and terrible to let anyone know what this game is.”  The other says, “but this is how big it really was!”  So I settled for it.

Nokia Snake is a rendition of the classic Snake game.  Gobbling up apples (or what I imagined were apples) scores you points, and as you score more and more points the snake gets bigger and bigger.  Exit the screen or collide with your own body and the game is over.

At the time it was one of the only games for the cell phone and it came for free on most new Nokia phones.  Nokia phones were interesting devices due to their features, such as 30 built-in midi ringtones consisting of the Mexican Hat Dance and the “I know something you don’t know” playground jingle.  My Nokia only had three games, and Snake was of course by-far the best.  It was great for sitting at the bus stop and playing; a game that you could quickly play for a few minutes and have disappear with the pocketing of the phone.

Controls were the numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8 on the cell phone num pad.  The colours were dull grey on black (or bright green when illuminated), just like a Gameboy without backlight.  The game has no levels or goals.  To be honest I can’t even remember if it kept your highscore.

The game was rather tough.  It had three difficulty modes which just boosted speed.  The curve between medium and hard modes was extraordinary and the game was definitely hard at the highest mode.  There were no levels but each time an apple was consumed the tail got more and more annoying to maneuver around.  My strategy generally consisted of running full circles over and over again until I started catching up with my tail, then moved on to a zig-zag pattern.

I’ll always cherish this game for it’s lovely simplicity and it’s portability on my chunky cell phone from 2001.  It’s a lovely, nostalgic look back at how far cell phone gaming has come.