AliceX: First Mac Game Returns to the iPhone

Last week, Steve Capps released an iPhone game to the App Store called AliceX [App Store]. This $1.99 game, however, carries special significance for long time Mac users as AliceX is based on the very first Mac game: Alice: Through the Looking Glass.


Original Mac packaging (Folklore.org)
Folklore.org has documented the story behind Through the Looking Glass which started as a Lisa game.

"You've got to see the new game that Steve Capps wrote", he told me while he was connecting his hard drive up to my Lisa. He booted up into the Lisa Monitor development system, which featured a character-based UI similar to UCSD Pascal, and launched a program named "Alice". Steve Capps was the second member of the Lisa printing team, who started at Apple in September 1981. I had seen him around but not really met him yet.

The game was even featured in the original Steve Jobs Mac announcement (2min 40sec) back in January, 1984. The iPhone version of the game contains the "classic" Alice pieces as well as "hip hop" and "bush memorial" pieces. Instructions, video and a simple javascript version of the iPhone adaptation of the game is available.


Steve Capps is perhaps most well known for his part in programming the Finder for the original Macintosh and subsequent work on the Newton OS. Capps has since founded a user interface design company called onedoto.

App Store Link: AliceX, $1.99 [Note: not compatible with 1st generation iPod touches]