I went into ChatGPT to make an image and found a much older distraction: Snake.
Not a prompt asking it to write a game. Not another app to install. A little blue snake, right there in the image-generation waiting screen, while ChatGPT was ‘Polishing details’.
There is something wonderfully familiar about that. We have a conversation with an AI, ask it to create an image, and fill the pause with the kind of game that once lived on a Nokia phone.
Snake in the ChatGPT image-generation screen
The screenshot is pleasingly spare: a dotted board, a snake made from blue circles, and a little face at the front. No elaborate world. No tutorial that takes longer than the game. You recognise the idea almost immediately.
The useful distinction is where it lives. This is a small diversion during image creation, not a separate Snake product and not evidence that every ordinary chat has a game mode.
How to look for it
Start an image request in ChatGPT and look at the waiting animation while it works. Users have reported tapping the animated dots to reveal Snake. If that works in your version, follow the controls shown there; the exact gesture and controls are not documented by OpenAI.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Images guide confirms image creation on web, iOS and Android, and explains that an image can take a few minutes. It does not currently describe Snake or promise that the game appears on each of those platforms. If you do not see it, I would not spend the afternoon trying to unlock it.
And no, asking for an image of a snake is not the same thing. The image prompt describes what you want to create; the waiting-screen game is the little extra while that happens.
Back to the OG Nokia Snake
For many of us, the reference point is the Nokia version: a small screen, physical keys, and the growing suspicion that one more turn will end badly.
Nokia’s Snake arrived on the Nokia 6110 in 1997. Taneli Armanto designed and programmed that version. His own account of its history makes an important distinction: he brought Snake to Nokia phones; he did not invent the underlying game.
The lineage goes further back. A Microsoft Devices retrospective traces the Snake-style mechanic to Gremlin’s Blockade in 1976, before its life on home computers and phones. Nokia made it a pocket habit.
The attraction barely needs explaining. Steer, collect, grow, leave yourself somewhere to go. A handful of rules can hold your attention without a cinematic opening or a daily reward.
A better way to wait?
I like this as a small piece of product design. It does not make the image finish sooner. It gives an otherwise empty pause a bit of personality.
There is a limit, of course. A game should not hide whether the image is still working, or get between me and the result. The job is still to create the image. Snake is the bonus, not the product.
That is part of the charm: one of the simplest games we remember turning up inside one of the newest tools we use. Not every useful addition needs to be a bigger feature.
The nostalgia fits rather well beside my old Maya cabin and its new playable chapter. Different scale, same pleasure in finding a familiar idea somewhere new.
Good ol’ Snake. Still finding ways to steal a few minutes.