FPS Classic Quake Now Runs On Apple Watch

Doom may run on everything, but Quake ain't far behind

by Jack Yarwood Fri 9th Sep 2022

Id Software's Quake is now playable on Apple Watch (as spotted by PC Mag and Apple Insider). Tomas Vyzmazal, the programmer behind this unofficial port, uploaded a video to his YouTube showing off the game in action.

According to the video description, the port was created using the Quake software renderer mapped to a Watchkit surface. Remarkably, it can run at 60FPS at a 640 by 480 resolution, with other resolutions available, albeit with a bit of a knock to the frame rate.

It takes advantage of the Gyro controls and the touch-screen interface, and it seems you can even use the digital crown to tilt the camera up and down. As if that wasn't enough, there's even sound, with the programmer getting it to work with a new AVFoundation audio backend. This was necessary as Apple Watch doesn't support CoreAudio. Vyzmazal also added a high pass audio filter to remove clicking on the Watch speaker for some of the low-frequency quake.wav samples.

While it doesn't necessarily seem like the method of playing Quake, considering the tiny screen and the slightly clumsy control input, it's fascinating to see this classic game running on such a minuscule device. Unfortunately, if you want to try out the port for yourself, it's not available on the App Store due to obvious licensing reasons. Instead, you'll have to build it yourself using the code provided on GitHub. You'll find the necessary instructions there!