Snake was programmed in 1997 by engineer Taneli Armanto for the 6110 and shipped preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones. No download, no purchase: if you had the phone, you had the game. As The Next Web put it: "Snake is considered to be the godfather of mobile gaming."
Snake '97 began when the developer's smartphone broke and an old phone came out of the drawer. The remake was built by analyzing the classic gameplay frame by frame: the timing of the snake, the response of the keys, the monotone sounds, the exact dot-matrix pixel grid. Seven models are reproduced (5110, 3210, 8210, 8850, 3310, 3410 and 7110), each with its own screen shape and its own generation of Snake.
"This is the most realistic Nokia Snake game we've ever come across," wrote the Official Nokia Blog in its interview with the developer (PDF, self-hosted). Engadget Deutschland called it "das vielleicht beste Handyspiel aller Zeiten": perhaps the best mobile phone game of all time. More press.
Keeping a 2011 game alive on every platform is its own story. The remake started as six separate native engines (Objective-C, Java, C#); in 2018 they were replaced by one shared engine that fits every screen in the world, translated into more than 50 languages. The whole journey, with the developer's photos, is on the making of Snake '97; the original write-up is on willem.com.
The remake is free on every current platform, and instantly in the browser. The high score still cannot be reset. Some things should stay 1997.