A programmer managed to get the original “Quake” game to run at 60fps on the Apple Watch, with gyroscope control and sound playback. Tomas Vyzmazal uses the “Quake” rendering engine to map to WatchKit’s watch faces, making the port run at 640p by 480p resolution at 60fps.
A video first spotted by PCMag shows the touch and gyro-controlled “Quake” implemented on the Apple Watch Series 5, even with the Digital Crown being able to tilt the viewing angle up and down.
While this is a completely impractical way to play, it’s interesting that the Apple Watch’s processor is capable of running this classic game without too many workarounds, and has access to SpriteKit, but the first-person shooter is nowhere near the platform It’s not easy to support, and it doesn’t need to be expected.
What’s impressive about this execution is the programmer’s ability to get the “Quake” game released on the Mac in 1997 to run in an emulated environment on the limited Watch processor. Since the Quake engine provides full real-time 3D rendering, this makes the game much harder to emulate on the chipset than the original “Doom”.
Audio is another issue, since WatchKit doesn’t support CoreAudio, Vyzmazal uses AVFoundation’s audio backend to make it work, which requires a filter to remove clicks in some low-frequency samples.
While the game is not allowed on the App Store solely for licensing reasons, those interested can build the project from GitHub. Use the provided code to build a demo file in Xcode to test on the Apple Watch in development.
