Secure Snake Home (SSH)

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Contents

• What is SSH?
• Connecting
• Playing
• FAQ
• History

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What is SSH?

Secure Snake Home, or ssh, is a protocol and client for securely playing multiplayer snake over the internet.

Unlike traditional methods of playing snake (such as telnet), all

ssh traffic is encrypted to ensure the integrity of competitive play. Say goodbye to cheating sysadmins at the top of your leaderboards!ssh is powerful and flexible. While it is primarily designed for competitive online snake play, an active modding community has used it to sell coffee over the internet and even to log into computers remotely.

snakes.run is a modern reimplementation of Snake Session Handler Daemon (

sshd) capable of supporting over 2,000 concurrent players in the same world-wide game! snakes.run gameplay from late in development. Note the 150 concurrent players!

Connecting

You may already have the ssh command installed. If you don't, ask your system administrator to install it. Then run:

$ ssh snakes.run

This will connect you to the game.

To validate that you've connected to the right server, use the

ssh-keyscan and ssh-keygen commands. You should see output like this:

$ ssh-keyscan snakes.run | ssh-keygen -lf -
256 SHA256:ZLQZHZlWglF2P1HOoQPCZeRDuqhHv6qe/sF94MlqAJ4 snakes.run (ED25519)

If you see different output, it's possible that a player is executing a "man in the middle" attack to view your moves before they are relayed to the server. To prevent cheating it's important that you validate that you're connecting to the right server!

Playing

While ssh control schemes have historically varied, snakes.run supports several "flavors" of input so most players should feel right at home.

Use WASD, Arrow Keys, or HJKL (vi motion keys) to control your snake. For example, pressing "W" or "Up" will turn your snake up.

Use Space to "jump" your snake forward 3 tiles. This can be useful when you're trapped by another player (or yourself)! Jumping can be used once every 10 seconds.

Avoid running into other players while collecting fruit to grow the biggest snake possible! Note that snakes are invulnerable for a little bit immediately after joining.

FAQ

Who made this?

ssh was created by Tatu Ylonen and has been supported by a worldwide modding community for many years. snakes.run was created by eieio.

Why does the game render strangely for me?

snakes.run makes use of Unicode Block Elements. Since these were added in 1991, your terminal may not fully support them yet. For example, MacOS's terminal.app renders them poorly. Try using a different terminal.

How does snakes.run work?

snakes.run is implemented using wish and a heavily-forked version of bubbletea. See this writeup for more details on how it works.

Does snakes.run support alternative clients?

Not currently. We're interested in supporting Multiplayer Online Snake Home (mosh) in the future.

History

1976

Blockade (multiplayer snake precursor) created.

1976-1982

Clones of the game (Bigfoot Bonkers, Dominos, Surround, Snafu, Worm, Snake Byte, Nibbler, Tron, etc) explode in popularity. Competitive arcade scenes emerge in most medium and large cities.

1982

First game of snake played over ARPANET

1987

Collegiate Snake League (CSL) founded

1994

MIT "pranks" CalTech during CSL finals by sniffing and mirroring their moves. The security of online snake over telnet comes into question

1995

Frustrated with cheating, Tatu Ylonen (a researcher at Helsinki University of Technology) creates Secure Snake Home to prevent move-sniffing attacks. CSL moves to ssh almost immediately.

1999

ssh modding collective OpenSSH formed.

2000

ssh peaks in popularity at 2 million players.

2009

Last dedicated ssh server shuts down.

2024

Terminal Products begins selling coffee over SSH. Start of the ssh modding revival.

2025

Development of snakes.run, an sshd implementation with support for thousands of concurrent players, begins

2026

eieio launches snakes.run

Last modified: 2026-02-24
eieio