We knew when we gave the original Half-Life a 97% way back in 1998 that it was something special that gamers would be playing years from then. But I don’t think we ever thought someone would play it on a Nokia phone at 30 FPS, with mouse and keyboard support. Oh, technology can be a wonderful thing.
Developer Dante D. Leoncini took to X to share a few updates recently, and one is that, after trial and error, Half-Life finally runs on their Nokia N95 at 30 FPS. They claim there’s still some slowdown, but they say, “I’ve already identified the cause and am working on a fix”.
Notably, they even got a mouse and keyboard working on it, as the Nokia N95 has Bluetooth support. One can assume some level of latency here with its Bluetooth 2.0 support (and there appears to be some in the testing videos), but it’s impressive nonetheless.
A few days after this, Leoncini not only announced a few performance and graphical tweaks for their Nokia port, but you can even create dedicated servers and use all the game’s weapons. Now, they’re working on a LAN/network play function, so you could technically fill a room with Nokia N95s and play Half-Life with your friends in the future.
If you’re looking to run the game for yourself, you can actually find the project on Leoncini’s own website. It’s specifically designed for Symbian S60v2, which is the smartphone software platform that supported Nokia phones in the 2000s. You simply have to move the original game files to a specific folder, install the engine (which can be downloaded on the website), and run it. From here, you can access a whole list of controls to even play the game purely via the phone’s own keyboard.
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The Nokia N95 was a pretty beefy phone when it launched in 2007. It came with a 332 MHz ARM11-based dual CPU, and the standard model came with 64 MB of memory, while the 8 GB model came with 128 MB of memory. In 1998, 300 or so MHz would be normal for a gaming computer (as with the likes of the Intel Pentium II), and somewhere between 32 MB and 128 MB of memory would be about what you’d expect too. You are missing a graphics card, like a 3DFX Voodoo of some kind, but the Nokia phone’s specs certainly aren’t too shabby.
Leoncini has not yet tested if the entire game works. They say the “game runs reasonably well” on their website, but they’re still testing it right now. They are also looking to improve performance, improve single-player AI, and polish graphical details.
I hope the multiplayer is working soon, as I, for one, would love to see a LAN party filled with nothing but phones, some Bluetooth mice and keyboards, and more than a few smiling faces. It’s a good reminder to revisit one of the most important shooters of all time, or play it for the first time in perhaps one of the most unique ways possible.
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