Quake 3 ported to iPod Touch with tilt controls

By Michael Hatamoto, BetaNews

April 14, 2008, 3:45 PM

Popular id Software game Quake 3 Arena has been successfully ported to the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch MP3 player by Canadian game makers, though don't expect it to be available to everyone just yet.

Game developer HermitWorks managed to get two iPod Touch users playing a head-to-head death match using built-in WiFi after eight to twelve hours of coding. The HermitWorks' version uses an accelerometer to control the player and taps on the screen to fire weapons.

Apple's recently released SDK was not used to help get the game running. Instead, HermitWorks used the ioquake3 edition of the Quake 3 Arena source code, which is a version of id's code that was enhanced can cleaned up by the ioquake3 team. In response to demand from the developer community, id Software released the Quake 3 source code in 2005 under the GPL license, after other titles successfully deployed the Quake 3 engine.

The reason HermitWorks was testing Arena was because its new original game, Space Trader, will soon be released using the Quake 3 engine. HermitWorks expects to have Space Trader available via iTunes in June, and expects to get a small level of support from the Apple SDK. HermitWorks does not plan to release the Arena demo code to the public.

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A demonstration of the game playing capabilities of the iPod Touch, which somehow you always knew was capable of good gameplay.