Slither.io

Slither.io is a multiplayer snake game by Steve Howse, released for web browsers and iOS on March 25, 2016, with an Android version two days later. You steer a snake around a large circular arena, eat glowing pellets to grow longer and try to make other players run into your body before you run into theirs.

Pellets, boosts and crashes

Your snake never stops moving. Small pellets spawn all over the map, but the bigger, brighter ones come from snakes that have just died, and they give more mass. If your head touches another snake’s body, you die and your snake breaks up into a trail of those bright pellets for everyone else to eat. Boosting makes you faster but burns mass, which drops behind you as a line of small pellets. Hitting the edge of the arena also kills you, and then you leave nothing behind. A common trick is to coil around a smaller snake until it has nowhere left to go.

The top ten

Each server shows a leaderboard in the top right corner with the ten snakes that have the most mass. At launch the servers held up to 500 players at a time. Slither.io is one of the best known .io games, and its idea comes from Agar.io and the old arcade game Snake.

Skins and nicknames

Before each game you can pick a skin, from plain colors and patterns to designs based on national flags and YouTubers. The Build a Slither tool lets you make your own by clicking colors onto the snake. Your nickname, up to 24 characters, shows under the snake’s head and on the leaderboard. Skip the skin menu and the game hands you a random plain color.

How it got big

Howse made the game after seeing how popular Agar.io had become, and it took him six months. He used WebSocket so a fast multiplayer game could run in a normal browser. Videos by YouTubers such as PewDiePie spread it, the iOS version went to number one among the most downloaded apps on the App Store, and by the end of 2016 Slither.io was the most searched video game on Google in the United States.

Controls

On a computer the snake turns toward your mouse pointer. Hold the left mouse button, the space bar or the up arrow to boost, and let go to stop. On a phone or tablet, double tap the screen to boost.

More like this: Little Big Snake, Hole IO and Digdig.io. Other games by Ouaz Games: Rotate Rings and Pop Glide 3D. You can also browse all io games and multiplayer games.