Ludography
Frozen Bubble cover

2002 · Puzzle

Frozen Bubble

Frozen Bubble is a puzzle game that started out on Linux and has later been ported to other systems.

Released
8 February 2002
Platforms
AndroidJava virtual machineLinuxSymbianWindowsmacOS
Genres
Puzzle
Developers
—
Publishers
—
Modes
MultiplayerSingle-player
Country
France
Age ratings
ESRB E

About

Frozen Bubble is a free software clone of Puzzle Bobble for a variety of home and mobile systems.

Keywords

  • open-source
  • digital distribution
  • games released for unsupported platforms
  • penguins

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Frozen Bubble's protagonist is a penguin a la Tux, the mascot of Linux and popular feature in many free software/open-source games. In this game, Tux has to shoot colored frozen bubbles to form groups of the same color. Such groups disappear and the object is to clear the whole screen in this way before a bubble passes a line at the bottom. There is a single player mode and a multiplayer mode via Split screen, LAN and Internet. The game features 100 levels and includes a level editor.

Development

In 2001, Guillaume Cottenceau started writing the original Frozen Bubble game in Perl while using the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library. The music was made with FastTracker II by demoscener Matthias Le Bidan. Alexis Younes and Amaury Amblard-Ladurantie created the sprites and background graphic artwork with GIMP. 0-only.

There is a version programmed in Perl and another one programmed in Java. g. Linux and the BSDs, while the Java-version runs on any operating system that supports Java.

Reception

Linux For You ranked Frozen Bubble 5/5 in September 2009. Frozen Bubble was integrated in many Linux distributions and also ported to many platforms like macOS or PDAs. Frozen Bubble became also a quite popular free game which got distributed via several gaming outlets and aggregated significant download numbers over the years: chip.de counted 80,000, computerbild.de 93,000, Softpedia 18,000, and Softonic 350,000 downloads. It was also included on several cover disks of computer magazines, for instance MacAddict in February 2004 and Linux Format in March 2009.

The Linux Game Tome's Best Free Game Award and Best Sound/Music Award in 2003.

Releases by platformdates and regions as published

PlatformReleasedRegions
Linux8 February 2002Worldwide
WindowsUnreleased
macOSUnreleased
AndroidUnreleased

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Collections3 collections

Platform libraries

Genres

Licensing

Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.