Mac.Blorge.com has posted a short article on playing Quake II using the Safari web browser and without the need for Flash. The feat is possible thanks to a recent port of the Quake II engine to HTML5.

Google’s Web Toolkit Blog brings us the superlative news that they’ve ported the Quake II engine to HTML5. No, this isn’t ready for prime time — some command line voodoo is required — but gussying up the code with a point n’ click user interface shouldn’t be too difficult.

"We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!”"

Again, to play Quake in either Chrome or Safari, you’ll need to download, compile, install and run the code, as well as some necessary add-ons, like Ogg Vorbis and lame. That said, you can get started here.

Mac.Blorge.com: Quake II Safari, No Flash

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