Frozen Bubble
Overview
Frozen Bubble is a free, open-source puzzle game — a penguin-themed clone of Taito’s Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move). Written in Perl on top of SDL and first released in 2001 by Guillaume Cottenceau, it went on to become one of the most widely distributed free games on Linux. You fire coloured frozen bubbles at a wall of bubbles hanging above you; match three or more of the same colour to pop them, and clear the screen before the stack creeps past the line at the bottom.
Key Features
- 100 built-in levels — a full single-player campaign covering a range of difficulty, with a built-in level editor for creating, saving and sharing your own puzzles.
- Single player and multiplayer — play solo, two-player split screen on one keyboard, or over a LAN or the internet in network mode, where cleared bubbles send obstacles to your opponents.
- Chain reaction mode — dropped bubbles fly back up to complete new colour groups, triggering combos and cascades that change the whole rhythm of a match.
- Hand-drawn sprite art and music — sprites by Alexis Younes and Amaury Amblard-Ladurantie, artwork rendered with Blender for version 2.0, and a soundtrack composed by demoscener Matthias Le Bidan.
- Runs on very old hardware — a lightweight 2D engine that plays smoothly on low-powered machines and single-board computers.
- No ads, no DRM, no account — a complete game with nothing to buy and nothing to sign up for.
Why Use It
It is the canonical free Puzzle Bobble: instantly understandable, quietly tactical, and small enough to run anywhere. Frozen Bubble is still packaged and patched by Debian (2.212-13 in Debian 13 “trixie”), and community builds keep it running on current systems. It collected a long list of awards along the way, including the Linux Game Tome’s Best Free Game and Best Sound/Music awards in 2003 and repeated Linux Journal readers’ choice wins.
Use Cases
- A quick, relaxing puzzle session on a laptop or an old PC.
- Two players sharing one keyboard for a round of split-screen versus.
- Designing and sharing your own level sets with the built-in editor.
- Introducing someone to free software games — the rules need no explaining.
Platforms
Official builds are for Linux — the Frozen Bubble Team ships source and distribution packages rather than binaries for other systems. Community ports cover macOS, Windows, the BSDs and mobile devices, and a separate Java version of the game runs on any system with a Java runtime.
Licence
Free and open source — released under the GNU General Public License v2.0. The original frozen-bubble.org homepage is no longer online, so the licence file and current source are best taken from the Debian package or the community repository on GitHub.
Similar Tools
- Pingus — free and open source, another classic penguin-themed puzzle game in the directory.