Forget About Doom: Quake 2, 3 Up And Running on Motorola Droid

Once upon a time, back when cavemen ruled the Earth and I was in college, the "in" thing to do (if you were a nerd, anyway), was to port Doom to various Windows mobile phones, PDAs, G3/G4-era Macs, graphing calculators, and other assorted devices with limited functionality and horsepower. Now, some 13 years later, porting Doom has apparently become too easy. Two separate Android developers have raised the ante and released functional ports of Quake II and III for the Motorola Droid.


That's quite a feat, considering the technological improvements that occurred between Doom's release (Dec 1993), Quake II (Dec 1997) and Quake III (Dec 1999). Doom ran acceptably on my 386 SX-16 and was blazing-fast on my best friend's 486 DX2/66. When Doom debuted, 3D acceleration wasn't even an option; by the time Quake III launched, it was a basic hardware requirement if you wanted to play the game. Memory and CPU requirements increased similarly, from a 386/8MB of RAM for Doom to a 90MHz CPU and 16MB for Quake II, and a 233MHz CPU and 64MB of RAM for Quake 3. Sure, the games are old, but the fact that they can be tuned to run on a mobile phone actually says a great deal about what sort of functionality we might see in future devices.


Here's a video demonstration of Quake 3 on the Motorola Droid. We don't have a video for Quake II, but both ports are running at playable framerates with 3D acceleration enabled.


Once Quake II and III are finished, how about a version of Civilization?