Ever looked at your Apple Watch and thought “Dang, I just wish I could play the classic 1996 first-person shooter Quake on this thing!”
… No? OK. But now you can!
Developer Tomas “MyOwnClone” Vymazal was able to get Quake up and running on the watch; while Vymazal notes that existing open source Mac/iOS ports helped a ton here, clever tricks went into making things like the gyroscope and the digital crown work with the nearly 30-year-old game engine. Even just getting the game’s audio to play friendly with the watch’s tiny built-in speaker took some workarounds.
Is it practical? Ehhh. Is it playable? Technically!
If you’re looking to play the wonderfully hacky port for yourself, Vymazal was kind enough to put the project up on GitHub for others to tinker with. A few catches, there: You’ll need to compile the code yourself and, because Quake’s art/levels/etc. assets aren’t open source, you’ll need to track down your own copy of those too.
Fortunately, Vymazal also uploaded a two-minute video to give you the (wonderfully ridiculous) gist of it:
