Steven Howse

Not to be confused with Steven Howse (born 23 September 1974) of Ohio, known professionally as Layzie Bone (one of the five Bone Brothers), a rapper known primarily for being a member of the group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

Steven Howse, age 28, at the wedding of his brother Andy, in Chicago, on 29 July 2012, 4 years before he would invent the game that would change his life

Steven Zachary Howse, born (1984-05-01) 1 May 1984, also known as Hypah, or The Wizard of Choctaw Drive, is an American software developer and entrepreneur best known as the creator of slither.io, a massively multiplayer online game released in March 2016. Howse built the game as a solo, self-taught developer; to protect the game's trademark he incorporated Lowtech Studios LLC in April 2016. Within months of launch, slither.io became one of the most-played browser and mobile games in the world, generating an estimated US$100,000 per day in advertising revenue.

Howse is notable for his extreme reclusiveness; no photograph of him has been published, he has given only two known interviews (both in 2016), and he maintains no public social media presence under his real name. As of 2025, he owned approximately $24.8 million in Texas real estate while the game he built continues to generate revenue with virtually no updates in nearly a decade. On 9 March 2026, OSINT researcher Michael B. Currie found a photograph of him from 2012, which was the first ever revealed publicly.

Howse accomplished what every indie developer imagines in their most optimistic moments: six months of work, alone, in a bedroom, yielding a novel game mechanic, and a fortune large enough to never work again. Then he disappeared. He is, in a sense, the J.D. Salinger of indie developers: the work speaks for itself, and the author is nowhere to be found.

— Michael B. Currie, March 2026

Slither.io MMO game in progress

Howse's central design contribution was the slither game mechanic: the transformation of the snake's body from a liability into a weapon. In the classic Snake game, a player's sole threat is collision with their own tail — a fundamentally solo and defensive challenge. In slither.io, the snake's body becomes an offensive instrument: players race ahead of opponents and cut across their path, forcing them to collide with it. The result is a massively multiplayer arena in which a newly-spawned snake with no mass whatsoever can kill the largest player on the server through positioning and timing alone. This inversion — from avoid-your-own-tail to make-others-hit-yours — is a conceptually original game mechanic, combining accessibility with strategic depth in a manner comparable to the foundational mechanics of Tetris, Match-3, the platformer, and the first-person shooter: simple to grasp, nearly impossible to master, and widely imitated since.

Early life and family

The Howse House: the family house since July 2000, and in 2016 the registered address of Lowtech Studios LLC and "Hypah" at 4303 Choctaw Drive S.W., Grandville, Michigan, as listed in USPTO trademark filings (2016). Google Street View.

Steven Zachary Howse was born on 1 May 1984. Homes.com lists Dennis as being an owner of the house since October 1974, along with "Gabel Howse", which is likely just a mistake; it is probably just the real estate agent? [4] (since from 1979 - 1987 the house is listed as owned by Oostendorp along with Dennis Howse, who is probably Mike Oostendorp, a Grandville real estate agent.] In August 2025, Dennis and Esther sold the family home to their youngest son, Andrew.

Steven's parents are Dennis Patrick Howse (b. 12 June 1946, 173 cm tall) and Esther Lois Howse (b. 1958), a "facilitator" at Byron Center Public Schools, approximately 15 minutes' drive from the family home.

He grew up at 4303 Choctaw Drive S.W. in Grandville, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids in Kent County. The property is a single-family dwelling owned by his parents. The family home was purchased in July 2000 for USD $187,250. While Grandville is only about 15,000 people, it is just a neighbourhood of Grand Rapids, which is the second-largest urban area in Michigan, with about 620,000 people.

Siblings

Andy Howse (center, large lapel) with his brothers Steven, far left, and Army Sgt. Keith Howse, in the uniform. The man on the right is unknown.

According to his paternal grandmother's obituary, Howse has two brothers:

Andy Howse, in an introduction video to his band Petals Rang The Bell, 3 May 2011 [3]

• Andrew Jonathan "Andy" Howse (b. c. 1988). Andy played vocals and bass in a Grand Rapids band, Petals Rang The Bell (2009 - 1 April 2013), just prior to his wedding in 2012. [5] [6] People-search records suggest he may have married a woman named Celia Perez [7] since at least 2019., and based on a photo in 2012, and his brother Keith's viral video, this wedding took place on 29 July 2012. (although now I'm less certain given his face in Petals Rang The Bell...) He frequented the message board Harmony Central as Grueller [8]. Possibly he is divorced from Celia as she is listed as Celia Renee Perez (1986 - ) living with another man at 611 Apt 3 Evans St, Grand Rapids. [9] [10] or possibly a sous chef [11]. It's not clear... he might not even be that band member, but that would be unusual since it's from the same town and near the same age.

Army Sgt. Keith Howse, in 2012

• Army Sgt. Keith Russell Howse (born 1971) He appears to reside in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the past. From May 2005 - May 2007 he owned 3860 Wilson Ave SW, a small home in Grandville. [12]. At this time he also owned from March 2005 to July 2007 another home, 1142 Dayton Street SW, in Grand Rapids. [13] This home seems to have been foreclosed by the bank, since the bank owned the home for 13 years after 18 July 2007, so possibly Keith defaulted on his mortgage during the 2007 global financial crisis. Keith's daughter is Nataja Howse, [14] [15], as of 2026, working at Gusto Napoletano Italian Restaurant & Pizzeria in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Another daughter is Jorja, based on [16]. (His birth year was listed as 1971. Current address for Keith that he purchased new (11 months after the developer put it on the market) on 7 February 2017 is 3005 Helmsman Drive, Fayetteville, NC 28306-8722, 910-745-8717, 616-257-3466, although he seems to have attempted to put his home up for rent in February 2025 [17] [18]) Since this 1971 Keith from Fayetteville is linked to Nataja, which is verified by his grandmother's obituary, this seems to be almost certainly the correct birth year, but this rules out Esther as his mother (she would be just 13) so it's likely Keith is only a half-brother for Andy and Steve, which makes sense since Andy and Steve were born in 1984 and 1988, vs. Keith in 1971. So it's likely that Dennis had a first wife. [19] [20] and this Keith was also subject to a viral video from Brookfield Zoo Chicago from 28 June 2012, with 1.9m views, greeting his daughters at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, he's an army man: [21] [22] (another Keith, not ours: (b. c. 1974, although this would mean he was born when his mother was 16), who holds an associate degree and whose current occupation is listed in public records as food preparation and serving.) Keith's wife is Aja Moores [23]

Other sources list individuals named Roxanne Howse, Sally Howse, and possibly "Oprah L Howse" in association with the family address, but these names do not appear in the grandmother's obituary and may represent conflation with unrelated individuals in people-search aggregators.

Grandparents

Steven's paternal grandparents were Eldred Winton Howse (23 May 1920 – 11 May 1999) and Gertrude Banman Howse (née Greene; 24 March 1923 – 18 March 2013), who married on 18 August 1945 and had Steven's father Dennis in 1946. Gertrude was a Canadian Mennonite from Gretna, Manitoba.

Steven's maternal grandfather was Adrian Charles Dawson (9 May 1920 – 31 March 2011), born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Adrian was an educator who taught at Grand Rapids Christian High School, Grand Rapids Junior College, and Michigan State University before retiring from Grand Valley State University in 1977 — the same institution where his grandson Steven would study 28 years later. Adrian's second wife, Irene Dawson (née Dryer Kopczynski; 9 December 1931 – 13 January 2023), worked as an accountant, retiring from GVSU in 1976 and from Forest Hills Public Schools in 1996, and served as past president of the American Society of Women Accountants.

Steven's maternal grandmother — who was divorced from Adrian Dawson — was Marjorie C. Ornee (died 20 November 2014). She had remarried to Ivan Bishop, and her maiden name was Ornee. [24]

Howse has Canadian ancestry on both sides: his paternal grandmother was born in Manitoba and his maternal grandfather in Ontario.

Education

According to his Amazon author biography, Howse "grew up with a passion for hip-hop music, earned a bachelor's degree in graphic design, and transitioned his way into the technology" field. He attended Grand Valley State University — located 13 minutes' drive from the family home on Choctaw Drive, and the same institution from which his maternal grandfather had retired — from 2002 to 2006.

Career

Work after University

After university, Howse moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota (address: 2641 Fremont Ave S, Apt 1, Minneapolis, MN 55408), where by his own account he struggled financially.

It is unclear if Howse had a job during the decade he spent in Minneapolis between his graduation from Grand Valley State University in 2006 and the release of slither.io.

By 2015 he had returned to his parents' home in Grandville, was living at home with his parents, and programming various online games.

Online identity: Hypah

Howse has been active online under the username Hypah since at least the mid-2000s. Several lines of evidence connect this identity to him:

• The App Store bundle identifier for slither.io is com.hypah.io.slither, and the iTunes developer page lists "Steve Howse" as the seller under developer ID 867992583.
• The family residence at 4303 Choctaw Drive is also the registered business address for an entity called Hypah.
• Email addresses associated with Steven Z. Howse at the Grandville address include hypah2@angelfire.com, hypah2@gmail.com, hypah2@hotmail.com, and hypah@hotmail.com.
• In-game bots in slither.io have been observed using the name "hypah".
• The Reddit user /u/Hypah (account created c. 2010) was identified by the slither.io community as the creator's account, based on the shared profanity filter between slither.io and drawball.com, another project attributed to Hypah. The account's comment history includes posts about web development in r/webdesign dating to approximately 2012:

Are you avoiding "position: fixed" because it lacks support in some browsers?

I'm not very good with web design, but all I can suggest at a glance is that the div's on the left and right of the main content should have their css set to "position: fixed; top: 0px" so they just sit at the top. I think you are currently simulating this CSS feature with javascript, because I see those div's kind of flutter when I scroll.

Drawball, Circle Push, Flappy 2048 Extreme

• Before slither.io, Howse developed several projects under the Hypah name, including drawball.com, which was initially registered as a domain on 22 November 2005 [25].

• He released Flappy 2048 Extreme in 2014 [26], already using Lowtech Studios LLC as the name, although it would not be incorporated until 2016 (?).

• On 26 February 2015 he released Circle Push on the App Store [27]

These two small mobile games: Circle Push and Flappy 2048 Extreme, both under the Lowtech Studios name., did not achieve significant commercial success. He has described himself as self-taught, with no formal computer science education.

Development of slither.io

Howse conceived the idea for a massively multiplayer snake game several years before development began, but initially abandoned the project because Adobe Flash was the only viable development platform at the time. When WebSocket technology matured sufficiently to support low-latency browser-based multiplayer games, he revisited the concept, drawing direct inspiration from the 2015 browser game Agar.io by Matheus Valadares.

Working from his parents' home on Choctaw Drive, Howse spent approximately six months developing the game. slither.io was released for web browsers and iOS on 25 March 2016, with an Android version following two days later. Each server supported up to 500 concurrent players. Howse deliberately avoided cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services. He later stated that if the game had not succeeded, he would have sought employment at a supermarket.

Technical Architecture

The underlying technical architecture of slither.io was not, in itself, novel—Agar.io had demonstrated one year earlier that WebSocket-based multiplayer .io games were viable in browser environments, and Howse explicitly cited it as his template. Both games relied on the same foundational stack: the WebSocket protocol for persistent low-latency server-client communication, and the HTML5 Canvas API for browser-side rendering without plugins.

The viable window for building agar.io-style games opened in roughly late 2012 to early 2013 — when RFC 6455 WebSockets had stabilised across browsers and Canvas was universally supported. Valadares built agar.io in 2015, a full two to three years after the technology became feasible, which itself tells you something about how non-obvious the idea was. Howse then built slither.io within a year of agar.io's proof of concept.

So with agar.io, Howse inherited a proven blueprint. But on a technical lavel, the genuine technical achievement lay instead in raw performance. Howse has publicly identified sustaining smooth gameplay with 500–600 simultaneous players on a single server as the central engineering problem, and the six months between conception and release were spent primarily in optimization rather than feature development. The server-side language has never been publicly disclosed. Node.js—the most common WebSocket application platform at the time—was widely regarded as ill-suited to CPU-bound workloads at this scale in 2016, owing to its single-threaded event loop model; the continuous collision detection, spatial indexing, and state broadcasting required for hundreds of concurrent snake avatars would likely have saturated it. The performance profile suggests a compiled or systems-level language such as C++, Go, or Java, though this remains speculative. Compounding the challenge, Howse sourced and managed dedicated physical servers in high-demand regions himself, eschewing cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services entirely—an unusual and demanding choice that forced him to anticipate capacity manually and negotiate bandwidth costs directly, without the elastic scaling that cloud platforms provide. By 2020 or so, he was sourcing dedicated servers from Internap in high-demand regions to control bandwidth costs.

That a self-taught solo developer achieved this from a residential address, and shipped a product capable of handling viral load within weeks of launch, represents a notable feat of practical systems engineering.

Game Mechanic Design

If the technical approach was evolutionary, the game design represented a more original synthesis. slither.io fused two distinct and previously separate traditions: the single-player spatial puzzle of the classic Snake game—familiar to hundreds of millions of players through Nokia mobile phones from the late 1990s onward—with the massively multiplayer free-for-all growth loop that Agar.io had pioneered. Howse's version of the snake mechanic was of a snake that could overlap with itself but not with other snakes in the arena.

The most consequential of these was the equalizing effect of body-collision rules. In Agar.io, large players dominate small ones by direct consumption, and once a player reaches a certain size, they become effectively invulnerable to smaller rivals. Minecraft Forum slither.io inverted this dynamic: any snake, regardless of mass, dies instantly upon colliding head-first with any other snake's body. A small but skilled snake can therefore bring down one many times its size, and cash in on a massive windfall of pellets in the process. TV Tropes Size becomes a liability as much as an asset—a longer snake is harder to maneuver and presents a larger target—creating a tension absent from both Agar.io and classic Snake.

The boost mechanic reinforced this balance. Activating boost accelerates the snake at the direct cost of mass, shrinking the player while they sprint. Pocket Gamer The tradeoff is legible to players within seconds of their first game, requires no tutorial, and generates the game's most interesting strategic moments: feinting, cutting off opponents, and sacrificing size to land a kill. Similarly, unlike classic Snake, a player can redirect through their own body without dying Meh, enabling the coiling and trapping strategies that became the game's signature competitive play.

The result was a game that solved a design problem Agar.io had left unresolved: how to keep small players competitive against large ones, and how to make any individual encounter feel consequential regardless of the participants' relative size. The simplicity of understanding the mechanics instantly, without a tutorial or guide, is a hallmark shared with classics like Super Mario and Tetris, and represents one of the keys to the game's success. Game Developer These choices, arrived at by a self-taught developer iterating alone over six months, produced a game that topped the App Store within days of release and remained among the thousand most-visited websites globally for months afterward.

Viral success

The App Store listing identified the developer as "Steve Howse" (developer ID 867992583), but some sources, including Wikipedia at various points, have also listed a "Joseph Eischen" in connection with development. A 2016 Reddit discussion noted the confusion:

The guys behind this game is so mysterious. I can't find any information on the internet. There was an interview with Steven House according to a reddit post but then the App Store developer is Steve Howse, and Wikipedia is stranger. It says the creator is Steve Howse but then the developer is Joseph Eischen. But it has web version and mobile version on both iOS and Android which doesn't seem to be possible to be developed by just one person.

The nature of Eischen's involvement, if any, has not been publicly clarified.

The game's popularity exploded after PewDiePie, at the time YouTube's most-subscribed creator with approximately 47 million subscribers, began producing slither.io content organically in April 2016. Howse did not solicit this coverage. By mid-2016, the browser version was ranked by Alexa as the 250th most-visited website worldwide, and the iOS version topped the App Store download charts in multiple countries. By the end of 2016, slither.io had become Google's most searched video game of the year in the United States.

By September 2017, the game had been downloaded over 68 million times on mobile platforms and played over 67 million times in browsers.

Revenue model

Howse monetized the game solely through advertising displayed after a player's death, with a US$3.99 option to permanently remove ads. He deliberately chose not to implement microtransactions or pay-to-win mechanics.

The widely reported figure of US$100,000 per day in revenue (approximately US$36.5 million per year at peak) was derived from advertising impressions across the game's massive concurrent player base. At the game's peak, with tens of millions of active players and each player seeing an ad on every death (which in a typical session could occur many times), the aggregate ad revenue across mobile and browser platforms reached this level. Individual ad impressions generated only a few cents each, but the sheer volume of gameplay sessions produced substantial aggregate income.

Acquisition offers

At least two major gaming companies approached Howse with acquisition offers, which he considered but ultimately declined. He acknowledged finding the maintenance of the game stressful.

In July 2019, Kooapps co-founder and Stanford-educated Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Chang contacted Lowtech Studios regarding a possible acquisition of slither.io. A Kooapps employee subsequently followed up, stating in a smug tone that failed to acknowledge the unique success of slither.io: "We are interested in acquiring Slither.io; we typically pay anywhere from $10,000 to $4,000,000 for an app." Howse declined. These facts are drawn from Kooapps' own answer to Lowtech's amended complaint, in which the company admitted the contact and the substance of the approach while denying other allegations in the same paragraph. Kooapps subsequently developed Snake.io, the game that became the subject of the trademark litigation filed four years later.

Howse had strong words on his discord server concerning snake.io, understandable considering it is an identical clone product of his, as well as the logo: "Snake.io is a fake piece of crap scam app, not multiplayer at all, and their logo is the most obvious brazen trademark violation I've ever seen in my life... everyone in the company that made Snake.io needs to be sent to prison for 100 years"

Subsequent development

Despite the game's early success, slither.io received minimal feature updates for nearly a decade. Promised features such as a "friendly mode" for team play and server selection were not implemented until approximately December 2025. The game's Alexa ranking dropped from approximately 250 in mid-2016 to nearly 10,000 by 2021. The game has been criticised for racist, antisemitic, and violent usernames due to the absence of any moderation system.

Trademark litigation

The snake.io logo, which obviously infringes on slither.io's logo. Despite this, the case has cost Howse millions in legal fees to pursue.

On 22 November 2023, Lowtech Studios LLC filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Kooapps LLC, the developers of Snake.io, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas (Case No. 1:23-cv-01437), alleging that Snake.io's logo, name, and overall presentation created consumer confusion with slither.io. The case was assigned to Judge David A. Ezra and remains active as of early 2026.

Lowtech's claims include federal trademark infringement, false designation of origin, trade dress infringement, trademark dilution, cancellation of Kooapps' trademark registration, and unjust enrichment. Kooapps denies all claims and has asserted affirmative defences including abandonment of the asserted marks, failure to police, and fair use, arguing that the word "slither" and depictions of cartoon snakes have been used repeatedly by game developers for years and that Lowtech's marks are weak.

Kooapps' counterclaims

On February 19, 2025, Kooapps filed counterclaims against both Lowtech Studios LLC and Howse individually, amended on April 9, 2025 (Dkt. 93). The counterclaims allege false advertising, defamation, business disparagement, tortious interference with prospective business relations, and statutory unfair competition under Washington law, arising from Howse's conduct on the slither.io Discord chat server.

Kooapps alleges that beginning in approximately May 2024, Howse used the Slither.io Discord server — which carries a "Developer" tag on his username identifying him as the game's creator — to conduct a sustained campaign of disparagement against Kooapps and the Snake.io game. Howse conducted this campaign under the usernames "Hypah" and "Hypah2", at times implying to other users that he was not Steven Howse. Lowtech did not publicly acknowledge that Howse was behind these accounts until late January 2025.

Among the specific statements cited in Kooapps' amended counterclaims, with contemporaneous screenshots attached as exhibits, are the following:

• On May 7, 2024: "Snake.io is a fake piece of crap scam app, not multiplayer at all, and their logo is the most obvious brazen trademark violation I've ever seen in my life... everyone in the company that made Snake.io needs to be sent to prison for 100 years."
• On May 7, 2024: "leave a 1 star review for Snake.io and delete it from your phone, it's a fake scam app, not actual multiplayer."
• On May 12, 2024, Howse acknowledged that Snake.io does in fact have a multiplayer mode, stating: "oh I see, the Snake.io app actually does have a multiplayer mode, but it's hidden, you need to tap 'Ranked' first." Despite this acknowledgment, he subsequently continued to state publicly that the game lacked multiplayer functionality.
• On May 31, 2024: "we need to get Snake.io taken down from the app stores, their trademark infringement is misleading all regular normal people who are looking for slither.io."
• On June 13, 2024: "their clone app is fake multiplayer! They are lying to everyone."
• On June 13, 2024: "I shouldn't say much since Kooapps probably sent their goons to lurk in here to look for clues about where to send their hitmen to make the trademark lawsuit go away."
• On September 9, 2024, referencing the official Snake.io Netflix trailer on YouTube: "everyone please leave negative comments on this video."
• On September 12, 2024: "maybe I should start a public smear campaign against them."
• On September 2, 2024: "the trial date isn't until December 2025, until then I guess they get to do whatever they want. They probably plan to keep scamming people as much as possible and then sell the game by November 2025... or maybe they'll try to kill me before December 2025."

Kooapps alleges that these statements directly caused a decline in Snake.io revenue, citing approximately half a million dollars in lost United States revenue from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in 2024 — the first year of quarterly revenue decline since Kooapps acquired the game in 2019 — which it attributes to Howse's campaign. Kooapps further alleges that Howse's call for negative YouTube comments on the Snake.io Netflix trailer was acted upon by Discord users, some of whom also edited popular existing YouTube comments to promote slither.io, and that the campaign extended to negative reviews on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Discord spoliation sanctions

Kooapps filed a motion for discovery sanctions against Howse based on his deletion of posts from the public slither.io Discord server during the course of litigation. Howse admitted to deleting 53 public Discord posts since June 20, 2024.

Of these, all but seven were already in Kooapps' possession or recoverable from moderation logs; the seven unrecovered posts were identified by Kooapps as relevant to claims regarding the performance of slither.io and reasons for its revenue decline.

In his defence, Howse argued through counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP that he believed Kooapps had already collected the posts of interest to it, that the deletions were intended to protect uninvolved third parties, and that no prejudice resulted since Kooapps had preserved the relevant content through its own screenshots. Lowtech produced over 3,100 private Discord messages in discovery and offered Kooapps a stipulation of authenticity for the pre-deletion versions of the public posts. Kooapps rejected this offer and sought nine sweeping adverse inferences covering matters including trademark strength, marketplace confusion, and damages attribution — remedies Howse's counsel characterised as "death penalty sanctions" bearing no proportion to any actual harm.

United States Magistrate Judge Dustin M. Howell issued a Report and Recommendation on October 9, 2025, finding that Howse had deleted the posts with intent to deprive Kooapps of evidence, noting in particular that Howse had previously testified under oath that he "did not recall" deleting any documents, before later admitting to the intentional deletions, and that his explanations for the deletions "strain credulity." The Magistrate recommended the narrowest available remedy: a permissive adverse inference instruction allowing the jury to presume the seven missing posts were unfavourable to Howse and Lowtech, plus an award of attorneys' fees to Kooapps.

In November 2025, Judge Ezra adopted the Magistrate's recommendation in full. Neither Howse nor Lowtech filed objections within the required fourteen-day period.

Kooapps sought $369,288 in attorneys' fees attributable to the sanctions motion. Howse and Lowtech countered with a proposed award of $32,572.20, arguing that the bulk of Kooapps' claimed fees related to a separate motion to compel that had been denied, and that Kooapps had used improper billing practices including block billing and excessive redactions. As of early 2026, the fee amount remained under determination before Magistrate Judge Howell.

Summary judgment and trial

In November 2025, both parties filed cross-motions for partial summary judgment (Dkts. 177 and 183), with extensive sealed exhibits. Briefing was completed in December 2025. The outcome of those motions will determine which claims proceed to trial. A trial date has not been rescheduled as of early 2026; the case is unlikely to reach trial before late 2026 or 2027.

Snake.io had been incorporated into Netflix's gaming platform as an official Netflix Games title and launched on the Nintendo Switch in November 2024, further heightening tensions. In late 2025 and early 2026, the official slither.io account on X conducted an aggressive and at times erratic public campaign against both Netflix and Google's Gemini AI, the latter of which had repeatedly generated incorrect information conflating slither.io with Snake.io in its AI Overview search results. The account censored the word "Netflix" as "N*tflix" in posts, described Google's AI as "dollar store offbrand garbage temu walmart AI," and hijacked a Stranger Things fan Twitter Space to attack Netflix — behaviour that some observers characterised as undermining the seriousness of the underlying trademark claim.

Howse is named individually as a counterdefendant in the litigation in addition to Lowtech Studios LLC. He is represented by Christopher C. Campbell and Britton F. Davis of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP (Washington D.C.) and Cecil E. Key of Key Kesan Dallmann PLLC (local counsel).

Reverse engineering community

The closed-source nature of the slither.io server, combined with Howse's lack of engagement with the player community, gave rise to a dedicated reverse engineering scene. The ClitherProject on GitHub documented version 11 of the client-server protocol, and in 2023 the "Snakey Monster" project created the first functional custom servers compatible with the official slither.io client, based on months of protocol analysis including packet captures of over 10 million food-spawn events.

Lowtech Studios LLC

As the game snowballed into unexpected viral success, Howse hired a law firm, Dickinson Wright PLLC, and they incorporated a company, "Lowtech Studios LLC" (ID 801964061), as a limited liability company registered in the state of Michigan. The company's registered address, as recorded in USPTO trademark filings from 2016, is 4303 Choctaw Drive S.W., Grandville, Michigan 49418 — the same address as the Howse family residence and the registered address of the entity "Hypah".

At the same time, his attorney filed a trademark application (Serial No. 87004605, for "SLITHER") on behalf of LowTech Studios on 18 April 2016, less than one month after the game's launch, listing a date of first use of 25 March 2016. The trademark attorney of record was Craig A. Phillips of Dickinson Wright PLLC in Troy, Michigan.

Additional trademark filings by Lowtech Studios LLC include Serial No. 87015861 (filed 27 April 2016) and Serial No. 87033507 for "LOWTECH STUDIOS" (filed 11 May 2016).

A June 2016 trademark filing (Serial No. 87058022) extended the slither.io mark to merchandise including clothing, stickers, comic books, and bags, suggesting Howse intended a merchandise line at the peak of the game's popularity. No evidence of any such products being brought to market has been found.

The filing required three extensions of time to submit a Statement of Use, ultimately filed in March 2019 — nearly three years after the original application, consistent with the merchandise line never having launched. The trademark was maintained with a Section 8 & 15 filing in July 2025, claiming incontestability — a procedural step that significantly strengthens a mark against validity challenges, filed in the midst of active litigation against Kooapps LLC.

There is no evidence that Lowtech Studios LLC ever had an office or hired any staff. It appears to have remained a fully one-man operation from inception through at least 2026.

Personal wealth and property

Residential history

Public records document Howse's progression from financial hardship to substantial wealth through the following addresses:

1. 4303 Choctaw Dr SW, Grandville, MI 49418 — parents' home; childhood residence; Lowtech Studios LLC and Hypah registered business address (2016). Family home purchased July 2000 for $187,250.
2. 2641 Fremont Ave S, Apt 1, Minneapolis, MN 55408 — the Minneapolis period referenced in press interviews as a time of financial hardship, prior to creating slither.io.
3. 4960 N Marine Dr, Apt 316, Chicago, IL 60640 — listed in people-search aggregators; however, this address may represent a conflation with a different Steven Howse in the Chicago area, as no primary source independently establishes our Howse's residence in Chicago. MyLife.com does list Chicago, IL as a prior city of residence.
4. The Catherine, aka 214 Barton Springs Rd, Apt 1422, Austin, TX 78704 — a luxury apartment complex in downtown Austin, near Zilker Park and Barton Springs Pool. Likely his first Austin address after the slither.io windfall.
5. 237 Hazy Hills Loop, Dripping Springs, TX 78620 — semi-rural upscale area southwest of Austin, popular with tech workers. Closed 11 August 2020. [28] for $587,700.
6. 70 Rainey St, Unit 3301, Austin, TX 78701 — penthouse-level condominium (33rd floor of 34 stories) in the Rainey Street District; assessed value $3,665,187 (2025); purchased in July 2019 and his current residence as of 2025 tax year.

Name variants appearing in public records include: Steven Z Howse, Steve Howse, Steven House, Steve N Howse, Steve Z Howse, and Steven Z Howuse. He may be reachable at hypah2@gmail.com, his Austin, Texas number (512) 202-7184, or his old Grand Rapids, Michigan number (616) 532-9830.

Texas real estate portfolio

As of the 2025 tax year, Travis County tax records list four properties under the name "Howse Steven Zachary":

Property	Location	Legal Description	Assessed Value	Base Tax Due	Penalty/Interest	Total Due
70 Rainey St, Unit 3301	Rainey Street District, Austin	UNT 3301 70 Rainey Residences Condominiums	$3,665,187	$75,007.49	$6,750.68	$81,758.17
2204 Canonero Dr	Davenport Ranch, West Austin (Eanes ISD)	Lot 64 & 65, Davenport Ranch Phase 5, Section 1	$4,359,254	$85,157.37	$7,664.15	$92,821.52
Pocahontas Trail (no street number)	Village of Volente, near Lake Travis	ABS 170 SUR 152 Coleman, 22.14 acres raw land	$8,339,343	$155,275.89	$13,974.83	$169,250.72
13300 Armaga Springs Rd	Scofield Farms, north Austin (Pflugerville ISD)	Lot 7, Block L, Scofield Farms Phase 8, Section 1	$478,560	$10,663.20	$959.69	$11,622.89
TOTAL			$16,842,344	$326,103.95	$29,349.35	$355,453.30

The properties span a considerable range: from a penthouse condominium in downtown Austin, to two lots in one of Austin's most exclusive neighbourhoods (Davenport Ranch, in the Westlake/Eanes ISD area), to 22.14 acres of raw land near Lake Travis, to a modest single-family home in Scofield Farms that is likely the property involved in the HOA matter (see below).

All four properties list 70 Rainey St as the mailing address (either "APT 3301" or "UNIT 3301"), confirming that as Howse's current primary residence — with the exception of the Armaga Springs property, which lists its own address as the mailing address, suggesting it may be tenant-occupied or was used as a prior residence.

A fifth property, 2701 Slow Turtle Cove, in the Westlake Highlands area of Austin, appeared in The Real Deal, a compilation of Austin's top residential sales of 2025. The 8,000-square-foot, five-bedroom, eight-bathroom home was listed at approximately $8 million (roughly $1,000 per square foot) and sold to Stuart W. Hudson, (retired founder of an enterprise software company called AgileAssert in 1994 that was acquired by Trimble in 2021), in September 2025. The sales agent Howse used was former drummer Michael Lamendola of The Austin Home Company. [29] [30]. The property does not appear in the 2025 Travis County tax records under Howse's name, indicating the sale predated or coincided with the tax year snapshot. He seems to have purchased this property on 12 August 2020 [31], after it had been torn down the original house, and built the current house. [32] He earned a return of about 35% over 5 years of holding the property.

A sixth property, in Colorado, he lost money on, buying in November 2020 and selling in July 2021, for a loss of $500k USD. (10065 Otero Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80920) [33] (however, this may not be him, perhaps another person; it doesn't have his middle name shown)

All four current properties carry accumulated penalty and interest charges as of the 2025 tax year, totalling $29,349.35 in penalties on $326,103.95 in base taxes due, for a combined obligation of $355,453.30.

70 Rainey Street penthouse

Howse's primary residence is Unit 3301 at 70 Rainey (@70_rainey on Instagram), a 34-story luxury condominium high-rise in Austin's Rainey Street District. Unit 3301 spans the 33nd and 34th floors, and is also known as "PH5", the 5th of 7 Penthouse units offered in the building.

70 Rainey, Austin. Howse's unit (3301) spans the 33rd and 34th floors, one of 7 penthouse units in the 34-storey tower.

Penthouse 5 at 70 Rainey, Austin, also known as Unit 3301.

The property is legally described as "UNT 3301 70 RAINEY RESIDENCES CONDOMINIUMS PLUS 1.5338 % INT IN COM AREA." The property's assessed value for the 2025 tax year is $3,665,187.00.

The pool at 70 Rainey; Howse owns the penthouse 5 unit far above this.

Property tax delinquency

All four of Howse's Travis County properties carry accumulated penalty and interest charges as of the 2025 tax year, totalling $29,349.35 in penalties on $326,103.95 in base taxes due, for a combined obligation of $355,453.30.

HOA matter

On June 21, 2024, the Harris Ridge Phase 4 Homeowners Association filed a civil lawsuit against Howse in Travis County Court, Texas, for unpaid HOA assessments on a property he owned in the Harris Ridge subdivision in northeast Austin. The property is likely 13300 Armaga Springs Rd in the nearby Scofield Farms subdivision, or a property in the adjacent Harris Ridge Phase 4 development — both in the Pflugerville ISD area of northeast Austin/Pflugerville.

A citation was issued to Howse on June 24, 2024. After a process server was unable to serve Howse in person, the HOA filed a motion for substituted service under Texas Rule 106 on July 19, 2024. An affidavit of service was filed on July 29, 2024, confirming service via alternative means.

Howse did not respond to the lawsuit. The HOA filed a motion for no-answer default judgment on August 26, 2024, and a default judgment was entered against Howse on August 28, 2024. Notice of the judgment was issued the following day, August 29, 2024.

On February 20, 2025, the HOA filed a Request for Order of Sale — an HOA foreclosure action seeking to force the sale of Howse's property to satisfy the debt. An Order of Sale and Bill of Costs were issued on February 25, 2025. Additional affidavits of service were filed on June 30, 2025, in connection with the property sale proceedings.

On August 14, 2025, a Release and Satisfaction of Judgment was filed, indicating that Howse had paid the full amount owed — ending the foreclosure process. The judgment amount — which in a typical Texas HOA default judgment includes unpaid assessments, attorney fees (at Cagle Pugh's standard rates for HOA collections), court costs, and statutory interest — has not been independently confirmed but would typically fall in the range of $5,000–$15,000 for an action of this nature.

Public profile

Howse is exceptionally private for a figure of his commercial prominence. His known public statements under his real name are limited to two interviews, both conducted in 2016:

• A 2016 interview with The Wall Street Journal (the primary source for most biographical details in circulation; behind paywall)
• A May 2016 text-based interview with Pocket Gamer, conducted by email with no photograph

No photograph of Howse has been published in any known source, other than a single photograph from his brother Andy's wedding that was finally revealed to the public by this article on 9 March 2026. He maintains no known personal social media accounts under his real name, has made no conference appearances, and has not given interviews since 2016. The contact page for slither.io provides only a generic email address (contact@slither.io).

His Reddit account /u/Hypah showed activity as recently as January 2023 (receiving an "Inciteful Link" trophy on January 1, 2023), but does not post about slither.io. He also appears to be active on the slither.io discord server as Hypah2 as of 2025.

References

A note on the true cost of property ownership

Howse's situation illustrates a principle well understood in real estate economics but rarely stated plainly: in jurisdictions with property taxes, no one truly "owns" real property. The state retains a perpetual claim, and failure to pay results in tax foreclosure. The "true cost" of a property is therefore not merely its purchase price but the purchase price plus the present value of the perpetual tax obligation:

True Cost = Purchase Price + (Annual Property Tax / Discount Rate)

For Howse's $16.8 million portfolio, with approximately $326,000 per year in base property taxes, the present value of the perpetual tax stream at a 5% discount rate is approximately $6,520,000, and at 3% approximately $10,867,000. The "all-in" cost of his property holdings is therefore not $16.8 million but closer to $23–28 million — a figure that assumes indefinite ability to generate income sufficient to service the tax obligation. In Texas, which has no state income tax but among the highest property tax rates in the United States (effective rates of 1.6–2.2% of assessed value), this perpetual obligation is particularly onerous.

External links

• Official slither.io website
• Pocket Gamer interview with Howse (May 2016) — one of only two known interviews
• /u/Hypah on Reddit (attributed)
• Steven Howse on LinkedIn (minimal profile; lists Grand Valley State University 2002–2006)
• Lowtech Studios, LLC v. Kooapps LLC on CourtListener
• Lowtech Studios, LLC v. Kooapps LLC on PacerMonitor
• Lowtech Studios LLC trademark filings on Justia
• USPTO Trademark Application 87004605 — SLITHER
• ClitherProject protocol documentation on GitHub
• App Store bundle ID (com.hypah.io.slither) documented on GitHub
• "What's the team behind slither.io?" — Reddit discussion identifying Hypah (2016)
• Steven Zachary Howse on White Pages
• Steven Zachary Howse on MyLife.com
• Harris Ridge Phase 4 HOA v. Steven Zachary Howse on UniCourt
• Travis County Tax Office — 70 Rainey St, Unit 3301
• Travis County Tax Office — 2204 Canonero Dr
• Travis County Tax Office — Pocahontas Trail (22.14 acres)
• Travis County Tax Office — 13300 Armaga Springs Rd
• 70 Rainey official website
• 70 Rainey on Instagram
• Hypah is a subdomain of slither.io, and was cited in the article: Data Collection Practices of Mobile Applications Played by Preschool-Aged Children by Fangwei Zhao, BA1; Serge Egelman, PhD2; Heidi M. Weeks, PhD3 et al. from 2020 doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.3345
• Howse, operating informally as Lowtech Studios since at least April 2014 (releasing games to the App Store with this name), formally incorporated Lowtech Studios LLC in Michigan on 18 April 2016, three weeks after slither.io's release.

The 2025 tax detail at his 70 Rainey penthouse is as follows:

2025 Tax Year Detail — Account #02030320710000
Owner: HOWSE STEVEN ZACHARY
Mailing Address: 70 RAINEY ST UNIT 3301 AUSTIN, TX 78701-4782
Assessed Value: $3,665,187.00

Austin ISD: Base $33,910.31 + Penalty $3,051.93 = $36,962.24
City of Austin (Trav): Base $19,206.20 + Penalty $1,728.56 = $20,934.76
Travis County: Base $13,775.42 + Penalty $1,239.79 = $15,015.21
Travis Central Health: Base $4,325.76 + Penalty $389.32 = $4,715.08
ACC (Travis): Base $3,789.80 + Penalty $341.08 = $4,130.88

Total Base Due: $75,007.49
Total Penalty/Interest: $6,750.68
Total Due: $81,758.17

• Internap:

A further window into Howse's infrastructure choices is provided by bankruptcy court records. Internap Holding LLC (operating as INAP), a dedicated server and colocation provider with data centres across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 28 April 2023, completing the process on 1 August 2023—its second such filing. The Final Decree issued in those proceedings (Case No. 23-10529) lists Howse or his operating entity Lowtech Enterprises among the creditors, confirming that slither.io used INAP as a hosting provider at least through the early 2020s. The choice is consistent with Howse's stated preference for dedicated physical infrastructure over cloud platforms: INAP's services were oriented toward high-volume, latency-sensitive workloads with online gaming as an explicit target vertical, and SingleHop—a dedicated server provider acquired by Internap in 2018 for $132 million—had by the mid-2010s become a well-regarded option among independent game developers requiring bare-metal performance without cloud abstraction. Howse's appearance as a creditor rather than a debtor in the filing indicates the relationship was that of a prepaying customer owed a refund or deposit at the time of INAP's insolvency.

For a man used to staring down the enemy, the anticipation of finally seeing his daughters left its mark.

"I am just totally excited right now, this is a great opportunity," said Sgt. Keith Howse.

"This is the zoo I came to as a child, so for me this is my childhood memory, so I want that to be for my children also," said Keith's wife Aja Howse.

Just 10 minutes into the dolphin show, the real waterworks began.

Eleven-year-old Jorja and 7-year-old Nataja hadn't seen their dad since last November.

The 40-year-old sergeant is in the Midwest for two weeks, during which time the family will attend his brother's wedding. July 12 he heads back to Afghanistan to continue his work of transporting troops and supplies to the frontline in the fight against the Taliban

"It was kind of hard to grasp the moment," said Sgt. Howse. "I was intently focused on their faces and just getting to them. It was probably one of the most memorable moments of my life."

"He's better than Superman," said daughter Jorja.

The Howse family is actually living at the U.S. forces base in Rammstein, Germany. Later this summer the girls and their mom will head back there, but not before lots of R&R with dad in Chicago.

Sgt. Howse's Afghanistan deployment should last several more months. He has just re-enlisted with the Armed Forces for another six years.

- June 27, 2012 (BROOKFIELD, Ill.) [34]

Army Sergeant Keith Howse attended Brookfield Zoo's 2:30 p.m. dolphin presentation today to surprise his two young daughters, Nataja and Jorja, who he has not seen for almost a year. For the past eight months, Sergeant Howse has been stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Sergeant Howse's daughters were called from the stands to assist in a special encounter with one of the dolphins during the presentation. The show's narrator announced that their father is serving in Afghanistan and we wanted to make this day special for them. After the girls participated in the encounter, the narrator said that there is another surprise for the girls and she announced that their father is here. They went running to him. After the presentation, many guests went up to Sergeant Howse to thank him for his service to our country.

The family currently resides in Germany, but has planned this special homecoming in the Chicago area because of a wedding they will be attending. Sergeant Howse's wife, Aja, is originally from the Chicago area and he is from East Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sergeant Howse will be here for two weeks before having to return to Afghanistan for three more months.

YouTube

See also

• Grand Valley State University
• Grandville, Michigan
• Slither.io on Wikipedia
• Matheus Valadares — creator of Agar.io, the game that inspired slither.io