Mato (Kai Risku)

Mato is a small DOS game by the Finnish programmer Kai Risku. In Finnish, “mato” means worm, and “matopeli” — worm game — is what Finns traditionally call the whole snake genre, so the title gives a fairly strong hint of what kind of classic this most likely is.

Very little information about the game itself has survived: even the exact year of release is unknown, and a copy was preserved only thanks to the Internet Archive. That is a typical fate for the tiny Finnish games of the 1990s home-computer and BBS scene, passed from hand to hand and completely overlooked by international retro sites.

Which is exactly why they are worth preserving in playable form. You can try Mato right in your browser on OldGame.cz and judge for yourself how this Finnish worm measures up to its more famous relatives.