GLOBAL – Many’s an hour I whiled away waiting for trains/planes/wife by dabbling into my Nokia’s menu and enticing an ever growing pixelated reptile around a tiny screen. Ever since it was launched a little over 11 years ago on the Nokia 6110, Snake has been helping clock-watchers the world over.

Of course nowadays we have things like Creatures of the Deep to whilst away the hours, but that doesn’t mean Snake doesn’t still get a look in, for we have the all-new Snakes Subsonic available on N-Gage.

The original versions of Snake have been distributed on an estimated 350 million devices, making it one of the most widely distributed games ever created. Its own history dates back to early-day computers and calculators, including the DEC PDP-11 and early Texas Instruments calculators. The Apple II had a version along with the 80s favourite, the Commodore 64. It was in the early 1990s that it appeared in Microsoft’s QBasic programming language and 1997 when Teneli Armanto, a design engineer at Nokia, first programmed it into a Nokia device.

It could be said that Snake itself kickstarted the whole concept of mobile gaming and formed the inspiration for the original N-Gage. Being included in the current N-Gage offering, gives Snake the respect and kudos it deserves. To not include it would be to ignore one of the most important influences in the history of mobile gaming.

Now, treat yourself to some interesting Snake facts

• It was introduced to Nokia devices by Taneli Armanto, Design Engineer, User Interface Software
• The maximum possible points on level one is 312 and on level 9 is 2008
• The points formula is: bits on screen (212) X level (1 through to 9) + 100 bonus points for completing the level
• Snake was one of three games introduced in 1997, the others were Logic and Memory
• Snake II appeared in 1998 on the 7110
• Snake Ex was introduced on the 9200 Communicator in 2000
• There are some 350 million phones out there with Snake embedded

I’ve just had a peak through my E71 and of course there’s no sign of Snake on there (had to look just in case). I wonder, if enough of us ask, would they bring back the original?