Overview

Frets on Fire is a free, open-source music and rhythm game in which you play guitar with your keyboard. Markers scroll down a note highway towards the fret buttons and you hit them in time with the music to score points, build a multiplier and finish the song — the same “plastic guitar” formula as Guitar Hero, without the plastic guitar. It was created by the Finnish studio Unreal Voodoo for the Assembly 2006 game development competition, where it placed first, and it is written entirely in Python on top of SDL and OpenGL. Development has been quiet for years — the last upstream release is 1.3.110 — but the game remains fully playable and its community-made song library and mods are still around.

Key Features

• Inverted keyboard gameplay — the keyboard becomes the fret board: hold it like a guitar and hit the function keys as the notes arrive.
• No hardware required — plays out of the box with just a keyboard, but also supports guitar controllers and generic joysticks.
• Built-in song editor — author and edit your own tunes from inside the game.
• World Charts — submit scores to the official online high-score list and compete with other players.
• Hundreds of community songs — a large library of fan-made charts, plus support for importing Guitar Hero I and Guitar Hero II songs.
• Multiplatform and open source — runs on Windows, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD, with the full Python source code available to read and modify.

Why Use It

It is one of the original free Guitar Hero clones and still one of the lightest: a small download, modest hardware requirements (128 MB of RAM and an OpenGL-capable graphics card), no account, no ads and no in-game purchases. The Python source makes it unusually easy to tinker with, which is why the game grew a modding scene that produced forks with themes, lyrics and extra gameplay modes. If you want rhythm-guitar play on a PC without buying a console or a controller, this is the cheapest honest way to get it.

Use Cases

• Playing guitar-style rhythm songs at home using only a keyboard.
• Creating and sharing your own songs with the built-in song editor.
• Importing Guitar Hero I/II tracks and browsing the community chart library.
• Learning from (or modding) a complete Python game engine.

Platforms

Windows, Linux, macOS (OS X) and FreeBSD. Requires about 128 MB of RAM, an OpenGL graphics card with decent drivers, and a DirectX-compatible (Windows) or SDL-compatible (Linux) sound card.

Licence

Open source — GNU General Public License v2. The source code and the game’s data files (excluding bundled songs and a few third-party fonts) are released under the GPL, so you are free to use, modify and redistribute them under the same terms. Note that the songs shipped with the game are not covered by the GPL: the project explicitly disallows redistribution, modification or commercial use of the bundled songs.

Website

fretsonfire.sourceforge.net · Source: sourceforge.net/projects/fretsonfire

Similar open-source games

• StepMania — open-source rhythm and dance game with a built-in stepchart editor and a huge community song library.