Alice. Remember Alice? This is an iPhone app about Alice…

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The title screen from Alice

I found Alice today in the iPhone app store. Remember Alice? It has a special place in computer-games history: It was the only game to ship on the first Apple MacIntosh computer.

The chess-related entertainment was written by Steve Capps, a legendary hacker who lives out here in the SF Bay Area. Among other things, Capps worked on the team that built the first Mac and was the person mainly responsible for creating the Finder, which is core to Apple’s OS to this day. Separately, in 1986, he wrote one of the first great sound-editing programs, called  SoundEdit.

Apple wanted those first-generation Macs to be used by business people as well as regular schlubs, so they never promoted Alice. But it gained a kind of cult following and was later released by itself as Through the Looking Glass.

Capps recently ported over Alice’s code to the iPhone, souped it up as a special 25th Anniversary Edition and put it up on the Apps store the other day, where it costs $1.99.