We Finally Know What Happens When You Beat Snake

Everyone knows how a game of "Snake" goes: players go up, down, left, and right to collect pellets and grow longer until they run into a wall or their own tail. It's a simple concept that was an instant hit, was ripped off by others, and adapted for additional devices like calculators, and it's become so ubiquitous that Google made it playable as an Easter egg when variations of "play snake" are searched. 

There have been a lot of different versions of "Snake" over the years, but all the way back in 1997 Nokia published the first iteration on the Nokia 6110. Even today, Nokia still includes the game with its devices, though the company's presence in the west has diminished in recent decades, especially after financial failures like the Nokia N-Gage.

There are a ton of gorgeous, technologically impressive games nowadays, but at the end of the day the classics really can't be beaten – well, in this case, some can. Most players never stay alive long enough to see the end of a game of "Snake," when the snake becomes so long that every single tile on the screen is covered by its body, leaving no room for more pellets to spawn. In a clip from Gaming Lab, and in similar videos from the past few years, that decades-long curiosity has finally been answered as players reveal what's at the end. As it turns out, beating "Snake" is a bit disappointing.

The Nokia 105 was released in 2017 with the same sturdy design and a version of "Snake" installed, two things that have become the company's hallmarks. This version of "Snake" has been around for a long time, and instead of the GameBoy-like monochrome green screen, this variety is orange and has subtle animations for the snake as it moves. The videos shared by Gaming Lab and others show the player's snake slowly extending to cover more and more of the screen with each pellet collected until it finally wraps around to meet its own rear. 

Of course, with no more space to spawn collectibles, the game can't continue, and the score won't rise. But there doesn't appear to be an actual end to the game as the snake will still keep moving at the exact same speed that its tail moves to the next square. In a Reddit thread on the OddlySatisfying subreddit from a few months ago, when the video was circulating, players were amazed to see that there wasn't an end programmed in. It's quite an accomplishment to run out of room in "Snake," so one commenter said that no reward for beating the game is less /r/OddlySatisfying and more /r/MildlyInfurating. Either way, it's neat to finally know how this version of the Nokia classic ends — or rather, doesn't end.