Snakes creator is far from tongue-tied

Taneli Armanto is, quite literally, the grand-daddy of mobile gaming. While he might not be a household name, he’s the man behind Snakes, arguably the precursor to all of today’s mobile phone games and Nokia is hosting a web chat with him on the 28th of June at 6PM (British summer time). The chat will be taking place at http://forums.arena.n-gage.com/ and comes two weeks after Armanto was recognised by the mobile games industry at a special event in London. “When we created Snake for the Nokia 6110 in 1997, we wanted to give people an entertaining experience, but we never imagined that it would become the classic mobile game. It showed people that you could create a great game for a mobile phone,” he said during his acceptance speech at the event. It’s estimated that there are more than 350 million phones in the world with a copy of Snakes on it and the game was re-worked this January for a special, free 3D N-Gage version. Available to download from www.snakesoutbreak.com, “the latest version of the Snake franchise has kept up the innovative spirit in which we created the original”, continued Armanto. "Mobile technology has evolved so much since 1997 that it was only logical for Snake to evolve as well."