XBill is an arcade style game for the X Window System. The game features a bespectacled character known as "Bill" (a spoof of Bill Gates). The goal is to prevent Bill's legions of clones, referred to as "micro-Bills", from installing "Wingdows", a virus "cleverly designed to resemble a popular operating system" (a parody of Windows), on a variety of computers running other operating systems. It was popular among Linux gamers at the end of the 1990s, selected as Linux Journal reader's second favourite Linux game in 1999. Originally written in C++, the code base was later with version 2.1 refactored to C.

The game was ported to Microsoft Windows in 1998. Openmoko, Android, and Maemo phones followed due to its open source nature. Re-implementations of the game also exist.

In 2009, the project was resurrected as XBill-NG, similar in concept to Lincity-NG.

Reception and impact

XBill was very popular among Linux gamers at the end of the 1990s, beating out Quake, though not Quake II, as Linux Journal readers' favourite Linux game in 1999.

The game holds four out of five stars on the Linux Game Tome and was noted by DesktopLinux.com.

Despite its status, it is not always packaged with Linux distributions due to its "disparaging" content: for instance Fedora does not package it, while Debian does.

See also

  • Neko (software)
  • xTux

References

  • XBill - Freecode