Android developer Thuderbird2k has ported the fondly remembered Quake 3 Arena to Android devices, though it won’t run playably on just any old handset.

Mad to think of Quake 3 as a mobile game...

Word comes via AndroidandMe of the development, a project which comes under the fairly unusual name “kwaak3.” According to the various reports floating around, it only took one day to compile and load Quake 3 itself, with a lot more time spent tweaking the port so that it would run with networking, sound and support for the device’s touch-sensitive displays. Still, there are some solid reasons not to bother with the sound.

While the developer was using Motorola’s Milestone (a Droid by any other name), those of us with other Android handsets may be significantly less impressed. Apparently, the Droid runs Quake 3, in its current incarnation, at somewhere between 20 and 25fps, depending on whether or not you have sound enabled. By contrast, the HTC Hero doesn’t fare nearly as well, scoring somewhere between 11.5 and 14.5 fps, with and without sound, respectively.

The word from the developer himself is that,

“When I received the Motorola Milestone phone, I wanted to get into Android development. I had seen ports of Quake3 to the iphone and the N900 which have similar specifications (all use a similar CPU and the powerVR GPU), so I thought why not bring Quake3 to Android. It only took me a day to compile and load the Quake3 main-function.”

Clearly this isn’t something we’ll see people flock to unless we see those performance figures pulled up a little. Still, it is an interesting piece of development, and one that doubtless will generate some buzz of its own.

For a long while now, the iPhone and iPod Touch, thanks in no small part to the App Store, have been fairly solid as portable gaming devices. In that respect, Android’s hardware versatility acts against it, as developers often simply can’t test for every possible device.

If you’d like to check out the project in more detail, you can take a look at the official page for Kwaak3.