Snaketron
Competitive online multiplayer Snake with ranked seasons, duels and team matches, rewritten in Rust 14 years after the original; the developer says AI got so good that they stopped writing code by hand.
Official site snaketron.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked from the developer's own Show HN post and from the README of the developer's repository (“Play now at snaketron.io”).
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — official siteBrowserReleasedFree
Runs in a desktop browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
- View on GitHubGitHubReleased · Source code for the game engine, servers and web client (MIT licence per the README)Free
Download from the GitHub releases page.
Desktop · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Snaketron
Snaketron is an online multiplayer version of Snake: you collect food without crashing into walls or other snakes, in solo practice, 1v1 duels, 2v2 team matches with an objective, or free-for-all. Every pickup restarts a one-second combo timer that makes later pickups worth more, and holding space boosts you to chain combos and get kills. You can play instantly as a guest or sign up for seasonal ranked play from Bronze to Grand Master, lifetime XP and skins, and the game picks a Play of the Game. The developer, lopatin, first released Snaketron in 2012 and posted it on Hacker News, where players exploited its client-side game state; the version posted in August 2026 is a rewrite, which the developer calls V2, with a server-authoritative Rust engine, shared with the browser through WebAssembly for client-side prediction, and servers that rebalance live games when nodes join. In the Show HN post the developer says AI got so good that they stopped writing code by hand and spent their time on game design and the high-availability work instead; the post does not name the tool. Free in the browser, with the source code on GitHub under the MIT licence.
How it was built
Partially verifiedIn the Show HN post the developer says one goal of the Rust rewrite was to learn the language, but that AI got so good that they stopped writing code by hand and spent nights and weekends on game design and the high-availability work instead; they doubt the project would have been finished without AI, alongside a day job. The post puts the project at 200k lines of code, most of it tests. No tool or model is named. The repository contains a CLAUDE.md file that opens “This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository”, which suggests but does not establish that Claude Code was used.
- UnverifiedCLAUDE.md in the repository, addressed to Claude Code, describing the architecture; the developer has not said which tool was used. — GitHub (lopatin)
A rewrite of the developer's 2012 game. The game engine is written in Rust in a shared crate that compiles to native code for the servers and to WebAssembly for the browser client, so the client can predict movement while the server stays authoritative. Per the README, the backend is a Rust server (Tokio and axum) for the REST API and WebSockets, with Redis (Valkey) for cluster coordination and as an event bus, AWS DynamoDB for persistence and Docker containers designed for AWS Fargate; the front end is React and TypeScript. The developer required the system to auto-scale so that a new node can join and take over live games without disrupting them. The repository also holds design documents, TLA+ specifications, a bot client and a load tester whose game bots play real matches.
- Engine / framework
- No engine (Rust game engine compiled to WebAssembly; React and TypeScript front end)
- Languages
- Rust, TypeScript
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“AI got so good that I stopped writing code by hand and preferred to spend my nights & weekends working on what was more intereting to me than borrow checking errors: game design and the high availability stuff.”Verification notes: The AI claim comes from the developer's Show HN post of 30 Aug 2026 (15:23 UTC), which names no tool, so the tool is recorded as undisclosed; the CLAUDE.md file in the repository is kept only as unverified evidence for Claude Code (the developer has not said which tool wrote the code, and the file's description, for example PostgreSQL for persistence, differs from the README's DynamoDB). Features, architecture and the MIT licence come from the README. The original game's Show HN post (“Snaketron, online multiplayer Snake”, snaketron.com) is dated 26 May 2012. Because the game was first released in 2012 and the rewrite's launch date rests on the Show HN post, no release date is recorded. The AI statement covers only the Rust rewrite: the 2012 version, made before AI coding tools, ran on a Node.js server script (server.js) with MySQL, per the developer's 2012 comments, and the 2026 post does not say when work on the rewrite began. One commenter on the 2026 post reported the website was not working; on 4 Nov 2026 snaketron.io served the game's web client, but we did not check whether matches can be joined. The README mentions a CrazyGames portal integration as a pilot; no CrazyGames listing was checked. The bots in the repository are scripted game opponents for testing; no source mentions generative AI running during play. GitHub statistics could not be read from the research environment. Team size and location are not stated.
Development history
The developer posts the first version of Snaketron on Hacker News; players find and exploit its client-side game state.
The developer posts the Rust rewrite on Hacker News as a Show HN.
OfficialHacker News (lopatin)
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
Browser (official site)
Free in the browser; guests can play without an account, and signing up enables ranked play and skins. No purchases are mentioned in the README or the Show HN post.
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
GitHub
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: GitHub stars.
Sales & revenue (all platforms)
Browser game — there are no downloads to count.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Prototype: your vote is kept only in this browser and is not counted anywhere.
Not currently ranked.
No player reviews yet.
Prototype: reviews are stored in your browser only and are not published or sent to a server. Reviews are shown in the language they were written in.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Show HN: Snaketron – Competitive multiplayer Snake. Back after 14 years Hacker News (lopatin) | Social post | Aug 30, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| lopatin/snaketron — README GitHub (lopatin) | Repository | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| lopatin/snaketron — CLAUDE.md GitHub (lopatin) | Repository | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Show HN: Snaketron, online multiplayer Snake Hacker News (lopatin) | Social post | May 26, 2012 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) lopatin | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
