Cancelled GBA Quake Port FOUND

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman


The year is 2002, and Randy Linden is hard at work porting Quake to a little handheld system called the Game Boy Advance. If that name rings a bell, Linden is a veteran game developer best known for the creation of the BLEEM emulator as well as the groundbreaking SNES port of Doom—the latter of which was considered impossible by id Software themselves. Given his prior experience, a GBA port of Quake seemed like a logical step in his career. This unreleased prototype we present to you today was recently discovered on a 256M Flash Card in Linden's storage, and is certainly a far cry from anything else developed for the handheld.

 
The fucking guy who fucking created Bleem?
I did a run of Castlevania SOTN on Bleem. Wasn't flawless, but fully playable from start to finish. 200.6%
 
Seems like it would have been a nightmare to play and probably ultimately not worth doing (even though the framerate is not bad compared to other "full 3D" games on GBA.) Works as a tech demo and a calling card, but everything about how Quake handles would have to be rethought onto a D-pad and a 1/4 framerate.

...But man, I remember playing even old Wolfenstein-type games like Backtrack on GBA and thinking, "Wow, I never expected a Game Boy to be capable of this..."
 
Last edited:
what I find especially interesting is that I can't really see any obvious texture warping...

every 3D game on GBA has very obvious warping, worse even than on PS1 due to the hardware limitations not allowing for even remotely the same amount of triangles on GBA, so no way to hide the warping.

games like Driver 2/3 or Asterix & Obelix showcase this very nicely. it's kinda hard to look at at times, even tho these games are very impressive of course.

so I wonder how this engine managed to avoid it. did he go way over on the polygon budget or did he implement some other tricks to circumvent it 🤔
 
Last edited:
neat GIF
neat something GIF
 



In 2002 developer Randy Linden set himself a new challenge : Port Quake to the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. In this episode we take a look at how the impossible was achieved, but sadly never saw any commercial release.
 
Top Bottom