Why give the snake colors?

The pocket snake game has one rule everyone remembers. Every dot makes you longer, and sooner or later your own tail boxes you in. We wanted to keep that feeling and ask one new question: what if the tail were something you could work with?

So every dot in Rainbow Snake has a color, and eating it adds a segment of that color to the end of your tail. Line up 3 of one color and a star appears. Eat the star and the line pops, so your snake gets shorter. Now the order you eat things in matters. Eat 2 blue, then 3 red, then 1 more blue, and a single star pops the reds and then the blues. The tail stops being only a danger and turns into a small puzzle you carry around the screen.

A bit of real phone snake history

The snake idea is older than mobile phones. It goes back to Blockade, a two-player arcade game Gremlin released in 1976. Nokia announced the 6110 in December 1997 and put it on sale in 1998 with Snake built in. It was written by Taneli Armanto, a Nokia engineer whose first job on that phone was coding the calculator.

He had a black and white screen of 84 by 48 pixels and a phone keypad for a controller. A Tetris-style game was considered first, but it raised copyright questions, and a snake was simpler. Armanto also added a tiny delay before a crash, so a quick thumb could still turn the snake away from the edge at the last moment.

Snake II came on the Nokia 3310, announced in September 2000. That phone sold about 126 million units. Through the 2000s phone screens gained color, and the game followed. Nokia’s own blog later described it moving from “the monochrome look we all loved” to color, with two-player games over Bluetooth or infrared. When the 3310 came back in 2017, it shipped with a new color Snake made by Gameloft. Nokia says some 350 million copies exist in some form, and Snake is now part of the video game collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The five colors and their marks

Each color carries its own mark, so you can play by shape if some colors are hard to tell apart.

• Red: a dot.
• Yellow: a stripe.
• Green: a ring.
• Blue: a star.
• Purple: a square.

How to play

• Pick Challenge or Classic on the phone screen, then press Start.
• Steer with the arrow keys or WASD, swipe on the screen, or tap the keypad under it.
• Each dot adds a segment of its color to the end of your tail and scores 1 point.
• Line up 3 or more of one color and a ✨ star appears. Eat it to pop every line. Each popped segment scores 10 points.
• If a pop makes 3 of a color meet, they pop too. That is a chain. The second pop scores double, the third triple.
• Walls, blocks and your own tail end the run.
• Challenge has 30 levels in 3 sets. Reach the goal for 1 star, and score the points shown for 2 or 3 stars. Classic has no finish line and speeds up as you eat.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips

Make a sandwich. Two of one color, a line of 3, then one more of the first color. When the star pops the line, the outside colors meet and pop as a chain.

The star waits for you. There is no timer on it, so if your snake is safe, finish setting up your chain first.

Steer around the dots you don’t want. One dot of every color is always on the screen, so you never have to take the wrong one.

Plan two turns ahead. The game remembers your next two presses, which helps when you need to squeeze past your own tail.

Your turn

The snake is waiting on the screen above. Pick a color and start your first line.