Play classic text adventures on your iPhone with Frotz
Including the Zork trilogy and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...
Forget accelerometers and console-quality graphics for a second. In fact, forget any kind of graphics. A new iPhone app called Frotz lets you play proper retro text adventures.
Specifically, it lets you download and play text adventures written in the Z-Machine format, which was most famously used by a firm called Infocom back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Games using it include bona-fide text classics like the Zork trilogy and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, for which you can find the Z-Machine files on the web and download to Frotz, not to mention a host of other text adventures.
Frotz has been around since 1995 as an application on various platforms, so its release as a free iPhone app is sure to please thousands of geeks around the world. Geeks like us.
The iPhone version has several games built in, but lets you type in any URL to download more, meaning you're just a Google search away from sites like this one, offering all the Infocom games as Z-Machine files.
Cool. To get iPhone Frotz, click here.