Jaguar Quake?


I was reading old magazine scans online (as I tend to do on a Saturday night when most other people are out clubbing...), and I came across this article:


Look a little closer:


Yep - it mentions Quake...for the Atari Jaguar. I did a little Googling and I couldn't really find anything concrete about such a port...but imagine if Quake really had been released on the Jag! Could it have even been possible on the hardware? Looking at the existing polygon-based games, I really doubt it; but with some expert coding, maybe it could have been possible in a cut-down form? Look at games like I-War and Club Drive...I mean, while the quality of the latter is certainly questionable, the 3D engines in both are very fast and smooth. Granted, neither game is throwing around texture-mapped polygons...but it is very interesting to see Quake even mentioned in the same paragraph as the Atari Jaguar, even more so to see that an actual print magazine reported a 30% complete build of the game.

Thinking even more about such a conversion, I struggle to see how the joypad would enable players to look up and down fast enough to play Quake with any real accuracy, but then look at the Sega Saturn port and the later PSX port of Quake II and it becomes apparent that joypads aren't really a hindrance. And they're even less of one when you've got 17 buttons to play with!

Obviously we'll never know, but it certainly is thought provoking: imagine a parallel world where Quake came out on the Jaguar. It'd probably be some kind of dystopian 2000AD comic strip by now, so maybe it's a blessing it was left at 30%

Phew...

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