Frac
Frac (not Fractris, as it is sometimes called) is within the Tetris clones a category in itself, despite some affinity to Blockout. You could say it was Blockout in a side view instead of top down.
When I first added this game in September 2004, it was little more than a hopeful guess. I had the names of the creators, Max Shapiro and Per Bergland. Max Shapiro was the one who collected the shareware fees, at an address in California. The name Per Bergland is definitely Swedish, and I found it mentioned as a Swedish game, and I didn't have a Swedish game at the time, so…
Only almost two years later I did what would have been a good idea all along, I downloaded iFrac and read the readme file. Michael Glickman had been in contact with both developers, and I found out that Max Shapiro's real name was Max Tegmark, and that he was from Sweden, too. He studied physics in Berkeley, was for a while at the Max Planck Institut in Germany and is now a professor at MIT. He was one of the inventors behind the Cyberscope, a device for viewing 3D images on a PC.
Per Bergland stayed in Sweden and now works at Carmenta, the company that developed SpatialAce.
In December 2006 Per Bergland sent me the full Mac versions of Frac and Frac4D with permission to distribute, and the following information:
The splash screens and various links display bogus information but nevermind… It's a "Mac OS Classic" game which means it doesn’t run on the newer Intel-based Macs but it runs fine on my iMac G4. Maybe I could dig up the PC DOS version but I spent infinitely more time on the Mac version.
Since the archive is named FRACPPC I assume it won't run on 68k Macs, but I haven't tested it yet.
