Frotz: Zork On The iPhone

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 13

This is going to date me in a big way, but during the years when I was about 12 to 15 years old I spent a little more time than I’d care to admit playing games like Zork and Planetfall on my Commodore 64. These games had no graphics. They were text based, or as the company that made them often said, “the graphics are in your mind.” Infocom, now an all-but forgotten division of Activision, was the company that put them out, and they were for an early generation of computer users, the games of choice. Intricately thought out, yet humorous in a goofy 1980s computer-geek sort of way, finishing an Infocom game was as joyous and yet at the same time bittersweet as finishing a good book. They required a kind a patience that is too rarely found these days. Devotees of the genre call it “interactive fiction.”

Someone today pointed me to Frotz on the iTunes App store. Seconds later I was installing it, and only minutes after that, saw the familiar opening screen of Zork I. Frotz is an interpreter Infocom games and other Z-machine games. I have MacFrotz and having bought a full collection of games on CD-ROM sometime in 1997, I’ve been able to use the source files to play them on OS X ever since. (Not that I have all that much time, mind you.)

Frotz comes not only with Zork I, which has been freely available for a few years now, but a batch of other interactive fiction titles, and you can download other games from the browser. You type your commands via the familiar on-screen keypad. And if you’re like me and have legit copies of the source files on a CD-ROM, you can probably figure out a way to install them. All these years later, I still haven’t figured out how to catch the Babel Fish in Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe now I’ll finally figure it out. Oh, and? Frotz is free.

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