Tomas Vymazal Puts Quake on Your Wrist with a High-Performance Port for the Apple Watch

Developer Tomas Vymazal, seemingly bored of the eternal "will it play Doom" question, has turned his attention to its successor — porting the classic first-person shooter Quake to, of all things, the Apple Watch platform.

"[This] uses [the] Quake SW [software] renderer + blitting to WatchKit surface (~60 fps [frames per second at] 640x480," Vymazal explains. "Larger res[solutions] can run on lower frame rate, tested up until 1024x768. Touch + gyro + digital crown controls."

That Quake can be run on an Apple Watch should come as little surprise: the game, complete with CPU-driven software renderer, launched in 1996 as a true-3D follow-up to the popular Doom franchise with the recommendation that players have a 32-bit Intel Pentium processor running at 75MHz or more, 8MB of RAM, and a VGA-compatible display. 2021's Apple Watch Series 7, meanwhile, has a dual-core 64-bit Arm-based chip running at up to 1,800MHz and 1,024MB of RAM.

Vymazal's work with porting Quake to the Apple Watch platform was assisted by id Software's long-standing agreement to release the source code to earlier game engines as they are replaced. Using the official source and existing macOS and iOS ports as a base, Vymazal added the new control system, a new audio back-end with high-pass audio filter to remove an annoying clicking nose, and enough "glue" to interface the original C-code Quake with Objective C and Watchkit.

"You cannot get the build on App Store, but you can build this yourself, having a Mac and Xcode," Vymazal notes. "This release does not contain any assets as they are copyrighted with non permissive licence (as opposed to the code), but you can use download_shareware_assets.sh to download and extract pak0.pak from [a] zip of shareware release of Quake 1."

Vymazal's source code is available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 2.