'Frotz': Interactive Fiction Comes to the iPhone
posted August 13th, 2008 12:48 PM CDT by Blake Patterson in Adventure, Free, Reviews, iPhone games, iPod touch games
Interactive Fiction (IF) fans will be pleased to hear that Craig Smith has released Frotz [App Store] for the iPhone through the iTunes App Store as a free download.
Interactive Fiction, better known as "text adventures" was a popular game genre in the '70s and '80s when computers were text-based or offered, at best, very limited graphical capabilities. The first text adventure, Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT due to a six-letter filename restriction on the PDP-10 for which it was originally written and available [App Store] as a stand-alone iPhone game) was created by Will Crowther. It was quickly ported to virtually every machine of the day and spawned an IF industry, the most commercially successful games of this sort coming from the now defunct Infocom.
The IF titles most gamers may remember is the Zork trilogy, published commercially by Infocom. Infocom published dozens of quality IF titles for most every computer platform available during its heyday. To make the development of such games for multiple platforms as simple as possible, the company created the Z-machine virtual machine interpreter which allowed a common game format, Z-code files, to be used for all versions of its titles, with only the interpreter program being written natively for each platform (not unlike the SCUMM VM, which is available for jailbroken iPhones). The Z-code format became popular among indie IF authors for creation of public domain adventures.
Frotz for the iPhone is a port of the popular Frotz Z-machine interpreter that was created in 1995 and is available for a great number of platforms.
Frotz is capable of playing most Z-code files out there (version 6 and above, which allow graphics, are not supported at this time). Frotz comes bundled with a number of public domain IF titles, with more accessible through a download repository integrated into the application. Users are able to specify other download repositories if they wish.
Frotz presents the player with a menu through which titles can be loaded and, once loaded, renders the adventure in a text window with a pleasant, parchment-colored backdrop. Games can be played in portrait or landscape mode and the standard iPhone text entry keyboard is used for input.
For iPhone using IF fans, Frotz is heaven. For those unfamiliar with the genre, this free download is definitely worth a look. IF may have sprung from hardware restrictions, but many gamers feel that the mind, rather than the graphics screen, is the best tool for rendering out an adventure. Some of the best games I've personally ever played are text adventures. Don't knock it 'till you try it.
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August 13th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
OPEN MAILBOX
TAKE BRASS LANTERN
GUNCHO KRILL
Ah, the memories.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Don't forget that Colossal Cave Adventure (aka ADVENT) is also available as a stand-alone game for the iPhone.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
@Lhasapso: thanks!
August 13th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
August 13th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
My favorite IF game is "The Gostak" which won 2001 Xyzzy Best Medium and Individual Puzzle awards. It's for people with some experience in how "those games" play, with a linguistic twist. You have to figure out the language used in the game!
Check out the Xyzzy awards to see games to try out. There's an IF Archive at http://www.wurb.com as well.
August 13th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Woot, you can find me at Flood Control Dam #3!
August 13th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I own a good number of Infocom titles (as in purchased, box disk and all). I'd like to be able to move the .z files to the iPhone for Frotz playing. I wonder how simple it is to set up one's own repository for specifically that (private) purpose? Should be no legal issues there.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:09 am
@blakespot
Just did that very thing myself, using FileMagnet, a $4.99 utility available through the App Store. Worked a treat, and now I can play all the old Infocom classics on my iPhone using Frotz.
Gnusto rezrov!
August 14th, 2008 at 12:25 am
blakespot, apparently you can set up your own website for this as well (you go to "Search" in the app and just type in the URL of your website where you have the IF files uploaded. Not sure if it works if you password protect it or not, but I would guess the easiest thing to do would be to set it up, download the .z files you want, and then delete them from your website when you're done.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Doesn't the iPhone SDK agreement specifically prevent a load of these features? http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/14/Suns-plan-for-Java-on-iPhone-could-hit-roadblock_1.html
August 16th, 2008 at 9:40 am
You can password protect your website/url using your host's control panel very easily. If the iPhone doesn't pop up the login, you can do it via the url. When you type in your url, just add the user name and password at the beginning, e.g. http://username:password@anexample.com/z/. That's how I go to boardgamegeek.com, because I hate the zoom and login process.
Note this is not the most secure method, but it will protect your stuff from casual access. If somebody sniffs your password, it's not state secrets we're talking about.
August 16th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
@Nick: Maybe Apple figured there's only so much damage a rogue Z-code file can wreak on an iPhone.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Wow - didn't even know this was there! Awesome!