At a recent press conference, Apple officially revealed its latest wearable device, the Apple Watch Ultra, to fans around the world, while fans were still hesitating whether to buy this latest product or upgrade their Apple Watch Series 8. At the time, a game developer named Tomas Vyzmazal successfully ported id Software’s classic shooter “Quake” to Apple’s smartwatch and played it on the older product, the Apple Watch Series 5. An iconic piece launched in 1996.
Before that, many modders had ported Id Software’s first-person shooter Doom to all sorts of unexpected devices, be it smart refrigerators, digital cameras, engineering computers, ordering food Machines, Lego bricks, and even electronic pregnancy test sticks, basically, almost any device with a screen will work. However, compared with “Doom” in 1993, “Thor’s Hammer”, which came out of the same school after a lapse of three years, has relatively high technical challenges in porting. After all, this work not only uses a full 3D environment, but also makes the Players can look up and down in two directions, and even perform actions such as jumping.
But after some attempts, Tomas Vyzmazal finally successfully ported “Quake” to the Apple Watch Series 5. Although this smartwatch is several generations old, it still has the processor power to run Quake at 60fps at 640×480, and even at a reduced rate. Runs to 1024×768 resolution at some FPS.
Due to the poor and weak speakers of the Apple Watch, it is difficult to present some of the lower audio effects in Quake, resulting in some obvious wrong sound effects during the game. A high pass sound filter effect has been added to the game. But amazingly, in addition to the operation buttons on the screen, this version can also be integrated with the gyroscope sensor of the Apple Watch itself, and even the digital crown next to the watch can be used for game operations.
In addition to the Apple Watch Series 5, Tomas Vyzmazal emphasized that any model of Apple Watch can run Quake, after all even the earliest Apple Watch wearable products have more than the classic shooter originally launched in 1996. However, players interested in doing so will have to figure out a way to get into the Apple Watch’s “integrated development environment” mode, as Tomas Vyzmazal currently only provides fans with access to his GitHub account. Provides a link to download the open source code customized by him. After that, players have to build the app themselves and download other necessary game assets using the shareware version of the game.