A programmer managed to get the original “Quake” (Thor’s Hammer) game to run at 60fps on the Apple Watch with gyroscopic control and playable sound. Tomas Vyzmazal used the “Quake” rendering engine to map to the WatchKit’s dial, making the port run at 640p by 480p resolution at 60fps. The speed is 60fps.
PCMag shows the touch and gyroscope control “Quake” implemented on the Apple Watch Series 5, even with a digital crown that can tilt the view up and down.
While it’s a completely impractical way to play, it’s interesting to note that the Apple Watch’s processor is able to run this classic game without many workarounds and has access to SpriteKit, but first-person shooters are less likely to be supported on the platform and don’t need to be expected.
What is impressive about this implementation is that the programmers have the ability to make the “Quake” game, released on the Mac in 1997, run in an emulated environment on a limited number of Watch processors. Since the Quake engine provided full real-time 3D rendering, this made the game much more difficult to emulate on the chipset than the original “Doom”.
Audio is another issue, as WatchKit doesn’t support CoreAudio, so Vyzmazal uses AVFoundation’s audio backend to make it work, which requires a filter to remove some of the clicks from the low frequency samples.
While this game is not allowed on the App Store simply for licensing reasons, interested parties can build the project from GitHub. Use the provided code to build a demo file in Xcode to test it on an Apple Watch under development.
