Frozen Bubble is one of the best-known free games of the Linux desktop, and for many people one of the first games they played there. This page tells where it came from, what Frozen Bubble 2 added, and why this port exists.
Frozen Bubble was written by the Frozen-Bubble Team: Guillaume Cottenceau designed and programmed it, Alexis Younes and Amaury Amblard-Ladurantie drew the artwork, and Matthias Le Bidan wrote the soundtrack. It came out in 2002, written in Perl on top of the SDL graphics library, and it was free software from the start, released under the GNU General Public License.
The idea was not new. Shooting coloured bubbles at a ceiling of bubbles goes back to Taito's arcade game Puzzle Bobble of 1994, sold in the West as Bust-a-Move. What Frozen Bubble brought was polish. The penguins, the icy backgrounds, the bubbles that freeze over when you lose, and a memorable soundtrack gave it a character of its own, and its 100 levels were carefully designed rather than generated. It was small, it ran on almost anything, and it was packaged by many Linux distributions, so a great many people found it already installed.
Over its later releases the game grew from a puzzle game into a party game.
Frozen Bubble 2 brought network play for up to five players, with a lobby, chat and
a small dedicated server, fb-server, that anyone could run. By then it also
had chain reactions, where bubbles falling from a pop can fly into a spot that
completes another group, and a multiplayer training mode against the
clock. Attack bubbles, sent at your opponents whenever you popped or dropped
more than two bubbles at once, made every big drop a weapon.
Frozen Bubble 2 is the version most people remember, and the one this port is based on. Its network protocol, its rules for attacks and its 100 levels are reproduced here, checked line by line against the original Perl source rather than remembered.
The original was written for the Linux desktop of its day. It depends on an old version of SDL and on Perl modules that are increasingly hard to install, and it never ran on phones, on Windows or in a browser. A game that was meant to be passed around had become hard to play at all.
Frozen Bubble: Fan Edition is a rewrite of the game in C++ on SDL3, the current version of the same library the original used. Rewriting rather than wrapping the old code means one program runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android (phones, tablets and TV) and in any modern web browser. The artwork and music are the original team's, and the code remains under the GPL, so anyone can read it, change it or build it themselves from the source on GitHub.
The network side is compatible with the original: this port talks the same
protocol to the same fb-server, extended carefully so that older clients
still work. The original Linux game and this port can share a server and,
for the original game's rules, a room.
Being a rewrite made room for things the original never had. Among them:
A full list of every difference from the original, including fixes to bugs in the original server, is kept in the project's comparison document, and every release is described in the release notes.
Frozen Bubble belongs to the people who made it. The full list of contributors to the original game, including the many translators and level designers, is in the AUTHORS file. This port is maintained independently and is not made or endorsed by the original team. On Google Play the Android version is published by Solina AI LLC, which makes no claim over the original game's code, artwork or music.