Halo (sort of) & Quake (maybe) come to the iPhone

With that hugely qualified headline, how can you not be excited?!

I have two gaming tidbits for you this morning:

(1) I mentioned a little while ago that Bungie had given their staff iPhones, and that there was an outside chance that a Halo port could be in the offing. Well, there is no news from Bungie, but Halo is coming to the iPhone (in a way) for jailbroken users.


Check out www.thebackofthebus.tk. Some hackers have taken the existing quake4iphone port, and modded it to look like Halo. You can check out a video of it on YouTube.

The graphics aren’t fantastic, but if you’re jonesing for some Halo action on the go, or if you don’t have a full version of Quake but still want to play a FPS on your iPhone, then this could be a lot of fun.

It is a long way from an official Halo release, but I still think that Bungie will come out with something interesting for the iPhone. Whether or not it’s Halo-based, who knows…

(2) For the much larger non-jailbroken group of users, Quake has been made into an official iPhone application, and has been submitted to the App Store. It has been ported by homebrew guru Zodttd, who was also responsible for the original quake4iphone.

You can check out the full details of the game at Zodttd’s website.

Although the makers of Quake – iD Software – have open sourced the game and some maps, I’m sure they still own the “Quake” trademark. So I’ve a sneaking suspicion that this one will get rejected, unless iD have given it their blessing. But as the source code has been GPL’d, there’s no reason why it could not be accepted under a different name. The game is being reviewed for the App Store at the moment, so we’ll have to wait and see. If it does appear, look for it very soon at number one in the Top Free applications list.

  • chrsfrwll

    Having fond memories of “Halo nights”, where a group of us would link up 4 XBoxes, 4 TVs (well, 3 TVs and my Panasonic LCD projector and a 60″ screen – I did need to have an advantage of some sort), and around 12 of use would play well into the early hours, I can say that revisting Halo on my iPhone would be welcome. I never bought a 360 so I’ve missed it a little since those days, years gone by.

    Here’s hoping, Bungie.

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net James Burland

    Bungie’s ‘Marathon Infinity’ on the iPhone… now wouldn’t that be something!

    Chris talks of “Halo nights” – reminds me of 1/2 hour lunchtime Marathon sessions back in the mid to late 90’s playing the original Marathon demo on our work LAN. 1 level, awkward controls, Macs running at less than 100mhz (a quarter of the speed of the iPhone CPU), but a whole lot of fun!

    Another FPS that would make a for a great conversion would be the original Alien Vs. Predator PC game. The minimum specs are well within the reach of the iPhone.