Because Why Not Port The Original Quake To Android

Not content with being one of the company’s senior engine programmers, id software’s Axel Gneiting has decided to spend some of his spare time giving the original Quake a bit of love. And naturally, one thing led to another.

Gneiting tweeted out last week that he’d completed the majority of work on getting the original Quake to run on Vulkan. If you’re unfamiliar, Vulkan is a new graphics API that id recently patched into DOOM to great effect. It’s given AMD cards a substantial boost and has even provided a small bump in performance for NVIDIA cards as well.

Quake 1 doesn’t really need a jump in performance, though. You can run the game at crazy frame rates already on a potato. But getting the iconic shooter has benefits other than running on a fancy new render.

Like being playable on Android devices.

Alex Gneiting was the one responsible for porting Quake to Vulkan, but the person currently messing about with the game on Android is Sascha Willems. He’s an app developer who also looks after the OpenGL, Vulkan and hardware databases for GPUInfo.

Now while the initial work in progress video has plenty of artefacts, the game’s first few levels are perfectly playable:

I’ve asked whether we might see Quake playable on regular mobile phones one day, given that Willems is doing this through a NVIDIA SHIELD. While I haven’t heard back from him, there’s no reason why it’s not possible. A controller might still be required — although there are plenty that work for smartphones — but it certainly doesn’t seem out of the realms of possibility.


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