How Quake (1998) almost made it to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance

sportskeeda.com:

There are many games that stand out in the history of gaming, and Quake happens to be one such iconic game. 1998's legendary first-person shooter from the wizards at ID Software was a technical achievement for the video game industry at the time, and the game is still cherished to this very day.

Bethesda and Nightdive Studios' 2021 Quake remaster for modern consoles and PC was a step in the right direction, offering the timeless experience to a new audience. Unsurprisingly, there have been countless ports of the game across different platforms over the years. This also includes a canned version for the Game Boy Advance (GBA), Nintendo's 2002 handheld system.

As detailed by YouTuber ModernVintageGamer (MVG), the GBA port was worked on by Randy Linden as a solo project. That's right; the whole process was undertaken by one individual as a hobby project. As such, it was not affiliated with Bethesda. However, Linden planned to get the build up and running so that he could showcase it to ID Software for greenlighting. Unfortunately, this never came to be due to the GBA's declining sales. Regardless, Linden released the GBA demo to the public earlier this month.

The details of how it all came to be are extremely interesting. Quake on the GBA was to be built on a custom engine - the original ID Tech would simply not be feasible on a platform that did not even support true 3D. Built entirely using assembly language, the engine utilized the device's hardware to the fullest to render clean and fast graphics on the fly. The result is nothing short of marvelous.

Linden's engine allowed him to convert the game's map data to a proprietary format for use on the GBA. The content created for the demo was correctly packed with all the