Apple Watch has received a port of Quake, a popular classic first-person shooter game that was released back in 1996. Developed by id Software, this online multiplayer game was a successor to Doom, another classic first-person shooter. Since its launch, the game has been ported to many devices, and Apple Watch is the latest one to receive it.
Quake on Apple Watch
Ported by YouTuber MyOwnClone, Quake on Apple Watch uses existing ports made for iOS and Mac.
Here are the features in the Quake port, as posted by MyOwnClone on Hacker News:
- uses Quake SW renderer + blitting to WatchKit surface (~60 fps, 640×480, larger res can run on lower framerate, tested up until 1024×768)
- touch + gyro + digital crown controls
- new AVFoundation audio backend (quake to Watchkit audio buffer copy logic), as Watchkit does not support CoreAudio
- high pass audio filter to remove clicking on Watch speaker for some of the low frequency quake .wav samples
- some smaller modifications and code updates to glue Quake 1 c code to Objective C and Watchkit
- built on OSS release of Quake 1 by id software and later Mac and iOS OSS ports
It’s amazing that the game can hit 60fps on such a small and efficient device. The game uses touch controls, but also gyro on the Apple Watch for aiming, and even the Digital Crown can be used for controls.
Of course, this is not something that you can expect to play for a long time, but as a proof of concept, this is pretty exciting for tech enthusiasts.
The developer has posted information on how users can build the game themselves, including a shell script that can download assets from the shareware release of Quake, as the assets are copyrighted. There is no way that this game can make it to the App Store due to copyrights and permissions, but if you are interested in running the game on your Apple Watch, you can check the details on Github.
Check out the complete video below of the game in action:
