Google Ports Quake II to Run Natively in HTML5

Google encourages their employees to spend 20% of their time working on side projects. In the past this has resulted in the creation of products like Gmail, AdSense, and Google News. Now perhaps the greatest accomplishment to come out of the 20% time has been revealed: an HTML5 port of Quake II. The game is totally playable with full HTML5 audio, WebGL rendering, and up to 60 frames per second game play. This uses no plug-ins and happens totally within the browser.

Google started with the Jake2 Java port of Quake II, and compiled it into Javascript. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Id games running in the browser. There is a port of Quake 3 Arena called Quake Live that runs in the browser with Javascript. Id Software’s John Carmack said in a recent blog post that he loves seeing Id’s older engines ported to different devices, and the results are there to prove it. Both the Quake engine and the Doom engine found their way to the Windows Mobile platform in the past. Though, they would only run on handsets with graphics accelerators. A British company called WildPalm even managed to port Doom to the Nokia 7650 and 9210. Now, no hardware is required, these game engines can be run entirely from within the browser.

The Google Code page has instructions for running the game on either Mac or Linux. They say they haven’t tried it on Windows, but see no reason why it shouldn’t work. If you give this a shot, let us know how it runs for you.